College Essay

6.First experiences can be defining. Cite a first experience that you have had and explain its impact on you. (University of Pennsylvania)
    Going into eleventh grade I had never been interested in drama. I had never been on stage, never had the experience of having hundreds of eyes on me. I had never tried to communicate to hundreds of people before as one does in theater. That year, my first experience in theater change that. It changed everything.
    I have always been a rather nervous person, and not inclined to trying new things. Trying out for The Death and Life of Larry Benson was an unusually forward move for me. I wasn't that confident in my skills, and I was worried I wouldn't get a good part, despite the fact that there were two major male parts and two people trying out for them. My irrational fear was alleviated however, when the parts were posted. I had gotten the part I had wanted most, the part of The Boy, a.k.a Danny Holmes, a.k.a. “You're not Larry Benson!” I signed next to my name on the part list, not knowing that that signature would hurl me into an experience unlike any I had been through before.
    The cast was made up mostly of people I had seen around before, but had never really talked to before. I knew three people from the cast well, and the rest were people I didn't know at all. I have never made friends easily for some reason, so I didn't think I would grow close to any of the people I didn't know. However, over the course of the production, I became fast chums with any number of student actors. Not only that, but I became more easy-going and made friends more easily afterward. The experience of putting on the theater production changed my attitude towards being friends with other people.
    The production of The Death and Life of Larry Benson also changed my activities outside of school. Since we finished the play, I have been to more plays and musicals than in the rest of my life combined. I went to Seussical when it was put on by my school, Macbeth, The Last Act, Seminar, and multiple others that I cannot recall. I also got involved with the effort to save the fall production. The production was being cut from the school district budget. A bunch of us from drama decided to go to a board meeting and protest about this. I was one of the people who spoke at that board meeting, something I would never have dreamed of doing a year before. The drama changed the shape of my life even outside of itself.
    My first experience with drama changed my entire life. It helped me grow into a more confident person. It also changed my interaction with the world outside of school, making me more interested in seeing dramatic production and in defending the drama club's existence. This is an experience that I would not go without, because who I am today is a product of that play.

The Internet: Good, Bad. or Ugly?

The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had. ~Eric Schmidt

The internet: the final frontier. An ever-expanding morass of information, images, videos, chatrooms, advertising, games, e-mail........ It is impossible to define the boundaries of the internet, or for one person to summarize the contents in a lifetime. No one person or group controls the internet, it is a catalyst for rebellion, enlightenment, and economic change. With a topic so hard to get a fix on, it is very difficult to ascertain the merits of the internet. However an easy quest is one not worth sallying forth on, so: here I go.

The Good
In days of yore, if one decided to deliver a letter, it could take days, months, or years to reach its destination and make a return trip. An e-mail however is write, click, and go. Unless the computer used is unusually slow, the sending should not take more than a couple seconds. This allows for a more streamlined communications system, and makes it easier to keep in touch long distance. The internet also allows for easier research. Instead of of searching through hundreds of books to find several that almost deal with the topic you’re researching, you can google any topic and get millions of results instantaneously. Online databases give credible sources for any research done. This plethora of information allows for a more informed type of citizen. The internet is also assists in the formation of a more democratic society, allowing candidates for elections to reach out to potential voters.  It also helps reformers organize and defend their rights, as seen in the Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Israeli border areas. The internet is a bonus for the people who would otherwise go unheard. All of these benefits of the internet improve the overall quality of the service.

The Bad
If I had a dollar for everytime I have seen someone on the internet butchering their grammar or spelling I’d probably have enough to go off to any college I chose. Or send all those people a grammar teacher. The ‘IMese’ language that has sprung up as a result of instant messaging and  chatrooms is making a mockery of the English language, and presumably of others as well. It is hard enough to learn a foreign language without having people saying “Lol” instead of “I find that highly amusing.” The internet is also reducing the intelligence and effort levels of youth, letting information be displayed at a click instead of after hours of research, and it also leads to a culture of multitasking, which has been proved to be an ineffective strategy. The internet finally leads to an impatient society. THe instantaneous services available make people want everything instantaneously, leading to bad tempered demanding of where is the damn delivery man with the pizza, I ordered it half an hour ago he should be here by now. All these factors are bad, but these are not the true horrors of the internet.

The Ugly
The internet is a place of danger for those who are not careful. Every year there are stories of the deaths caused by careless use of the internet. One case that comes to mind happened several years ago. A mother and her daughter went on Facebook and contacted a girl from the daughter’s school. They pretended to be a boy of about the other girl’s age, and started to worm their way into the girl’s trust. The girl soon started to like the ‘boy’ in a more than platonic way. One day when she sat down at the computer, there were hurtful and insulting messages on Facebook. The next day the girl was dead. She had committed suicide  over what the mother and daughter had said to her. Recently, another high profile case occurred. A student at Rutgers University jumped from the George Washington Bridge to commit suicide. His roommate had taken a video of him copulating with another man in the dorm. The roommate then posted this video on Youtube for the whole world to see. These abuses show that the internet makes it much easier to be callous and cruel than it is face to face, where you can see the other people’s reactions. A person can also conceal their true identity on the web, leading to cases of bullying, robbery, murder, and rape. The internet allows humans to deceive others of their kind into following them into traps.

The internet: is it good, bad, or ugly. The benefits must be weighed with the risks, both societal and personal. In the end it is the decision of each individual to use or not use this dangerous and misunderstood creation of humankind.

What Makes a Good Book Good?

There's a cliche out there about settling down in a comfy chair in front of a roaring fire, perhaps with a warm drink, and reading a good book while a storm rages outside. To do this you need 1) A comfy chair. A chair which makes the sitter feel comfortable. 2) A roaring fire. A heap of burning logs, preferably in a fireplace. 3) A drink. Liquid. Edible. Heated. 4) A good book. This is the tricky part. A good book is something different for each person. My father likes histories, biographies, and mysteries. I prefer fantasy, realistic fiction, and comic pieces. Somewhere in the universe there is probably someone who likes nothing better than curling up with a physics textbook. To each his own, as they say. Still there are some aspects of good books that are universal.

The first of these aspects is the quality of the writing itself. Truly good writing must engage and draw in the reader. The writing must seem to be alive, to convey the soul of the writing, even if the soul of the writing is that e=mc^2. Good writing doesn't necessarily have to use big impressive word like paraprosdokian or antidisestablishmentarianism, it has to use words effectively. Good writing is not measurable by any existing scale, but must be judged by humans based on the reverberation in their inner self.

The second aspect of a good book is the content. The meat of any book, the content is the story in most books, or the factual content in a textbook. In any book, the content is the part that determines the lessons the reader takes away from the reading. If the content is good, the lessons will be memorable and lasting, if the content is otherwise, the book will fade into the background of the mind, becoming like a piece of furniture sitting in storage that nobody ever thinks about. It's there, you can use it, but nobody cares very much about it, it's no use to anyone, and it uses up space that could be used for something else with better content. Or prettier designs. If the writing is the soul of a piece, content is the heart, and without good content no book will ever be above mediocre.

The third and final piece of a good book is the order. This may seem somewhat anti-climactic, but is essential if thought about. If Heart of Darkness started with Kurtz dying and then proceeded to the outer station before hopping to the unnamed intendeds conversation with Marlow, then went back to the Marlow's experience in Europe, it wouldn't make any sense. Similarly, if a physics textbook started with the advanced material before teaching the basic any prospective learners would feel like their brain was oozing out of their eyeballs. I speak from experience. The order of a book is the nervous system, the circulatory system, and the respiratory system of a book. It is what makes the content and the writing quality able to shine through the muddle of words on the page and enlighten the pilgrims of the page. The order is what makes the sense in our mad world show, paltry though it might be.

Writing quality, content, and order. All three are essential to good writing. Yet in the end, each individual must judge each of these parts and a work as a whole themselves. What one person may love and live their life by and sleep with under their pillow might repulse another person (this would seem to be especially true of religious works). In the end what makes a book good is the love of people for it.

Best Book Ever

Evan Pallor

When I was young, if I was asked what my favorite book was, I would probably say Harry Potter. As I grew older, I went through about twenty different favorite books. Around the time I started my sophomore year I was heavily into the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. I loved Pratchett’s style and his humor, I laughed out loud more often then I had done with any author before. My obsession with his books continued throughout the year, until one day I saw something magical. A unicorn Voldemort pikachu Ms. Diana kid in my English class was reading a book entitled Good Omens. I looked at the author’s name, and lo and behold it was co-authored by Terry Pratchett and another of my favorite authors Neil Gaiman. I asked the student (who shall remain nameless so as to prevent his cover being blown in his clandestine operation) if I could borrow the book when he finished it. He said yes, and two day later I first laid hands on the best book in the known universe. I took the book, I went home, I read it that night. Four hundred and twelve pages in one night. I could not put the book down. I returned the book to the anonymous donor, and spent the next couple months itching to re-read the book. Finally, for my birthday, I got a nook, and you can guess what the first book I bought was. I finally had a copy for myself, and I have been reading it ever since. The most times I ever read Good Omens in a week was five. That’s how much I love this book.

I suppose with my ranting and raving about Good Omens I have probably made you curious about the actual story of the book. It’s about angels, demons, heaven, and hell and why publishing true prophesies doesn’t make a profit. The main characters are a demon named Crowley and an angel named Aziraphale. They are both changed from their six thousand year stay on earth, becoming infernal / celestial beings of the world. When news of the birth of the Antichrist and the impending apocalypse arrives they both decide to try to stop it so they can partake in worldly pleasures for awhile longer. Meanwhile, due to an accidental baby swap, Adam the Antichrist is growing up quite untainted by either ethereal or infernal forces. Anathema Device, a psychic descendant of Agnes Nutter, the author of The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch which contains a completely accurate description of the events leading up to the apocolypse and Newton Pulsifer, witchfinder private and technological genius (not) are two other major characters. The entire story is an absolutely beautiful work of art.

I <3 Good Omens.

        

            The gaining of literacy is the most important part of a child’s development. With the coming of literacy the world opens up to the child. My journey was in two parts.

When I was very young my mother would read to me in the bathtub. I loved the stories she read to me, letting myself be swept away to the lands that were presented in these books. The first books I remember having read to me were the Redwall books. These books were about the adventures of walking, talking animals who killed each other and ate a lot. At the time, I was captivated by these stories. However these books were not the ones that would eventually have the most impact on my reading. In first grade I started to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone with my mom. This book opened my imagination to a world of magic and mystery in a way that nothing else had, and I wished it was real as I hadn’t with anything else (I was very disappointed on my eleventh birthday when I did not receive an owl with an invitation to Hogwarts). The Harry Potter books continued to cast their spell over me until the seventh book was released in 2007. The first books of the series helped me become fluent in the decoding and inscription of the hieroglyphs of the English languages. Both of these book series assisted in my journey to literacy.

The other part of my transition to literary sentience was the influence of my early teachers. In kindergarten I had a teacher who, to preserve anonymity, I shall call Ms. X. I hated Ms. X. I had troubles completing the exercises in writing that she set, and because I took longer than everyone else to finish them, she made me work on them into free time. As a five-year-old, this was quite emotionally scarring, slightly ridiculous though it may sound. I hated anything to do with the cursed letters she made me laboriously form, time after time, she refused to even listen, I wouldn’t mind, if I knew what I was missing. I found out precisely what it was that I was missing the next year. My teacher that year will be called Ms. N for the purposes of this blog. She was much younger than Ms. X, and much nicer too. She focused more on the reading portion of literacy, making me appreciate the value in the laborious formation of letters. Ms. N helped me understand the beauty and magic behind the etching of the alphabet, and the stories and history that would be unknown without them. Her teaching techniques were much more child-friendly than Ms. O’s house of horror classroom style. I actually went from being one of the worst readers in my grade to reading far above grade level in one year. Both of these teachers contributed in their own vastly different ways to my journey to literacy.

            Every literate child became literate in a different way. My journey began in the bathtub with my mother reading to me. The Harry Potter books were an essential aspect of this step in my journey. My kindergarten and first grade teachers were both imperative in the formation of my attitude towards literature, although fortunately first grade had a much greater effect. Altogether, my journey to literacy was not worthy of a page and a half of written material.