文書寫作
申請季悄然而至,今天我們來聊一聊申請的重頭戲—文書寫作,他是鮮明展現“個人形象”的申請材料,也是申請者個性和靈魂的載體,一份優秀的文書通常需要1-2個月的時間仔細打磨,反復潤色,才能達到字字珠璣的效果,所以其重要程度顯而易見。
一個標化成績優秀但文書缺乏特色的申請者,難免會給招生官留下boring的印象。那么如何撰寫一份好的文書呢?
今天跟大家分享一下美本名校申請中的優秀文書,對正在準備的申請者來說有很大的借鑒價值!!
約翰霍普金斯
“Bring the ace of spades up,” my Grandmother said as we started our first game of solitaire after I got home from school. “Now, put the black eight onto the red nine.” We played solitaire often, working together to reorganize the cards most efficiently. While it was meant to be a single-player game, solitaire was the one thing we did together, moving and dealing the cards in a symphony of order: red to black, red to black. Pulling the pattern out of the random array of cards.
For hours, we sat at our glossy kitchen table, playing game after game. If there were no more moves to make, I would always sneak a card from below a column without my grandma seeing. She always did. I couldn’t understand- What was the big deal of revealing the cards? We might win one out of ten games played. But if we just ‘helped ourselves,’ as I liked to call it, we could win them all. I didn’t understand her adherence to the “Turn Three” rule.
Why not just turn the cards one by one? It was too frustrating to see the cards go by, but turn exactly three and not be able to pick them up! After one game we lost, I asked my grandma, “Why do we play this way? There’s a much better way to play.” In response, she quickly explained her adamancy to the rules, what before had made no sense to me.
Her polished fingernails scratched against the cards as she shuffled them and told me. “Solitaire isn’t just a game for one person.” Her deep brown eyes sharply glanced at me, “No.” It wasn’t just a game for one person, but rather for two sides of a person. It was an internal battle, a strengthening of the mind. One playing against oneself. “If one side of you cheats, how would either side get better?”
Red lipsticked lips slightly grinned as my grandma saw me trying to understand, but I didn’t agree with this thought at once. The cards rhythmically slapped down onto the table as my grandmother, small yet stoic, effortlessly moved the cards with frail hands. I watched her. I thought about any other way to understand this idea.
I desperately wanted to. Trying to think, I couldn’t imagine another instance where this sense of tranquility, bringing the melody of organization out of a cacophony of random cards, came from such intense competition.
The slow manipulation of life around her precedent made me think back to my grandma, to what she told me, and made me understand. Two years later, pushing myself harder than I ever had before in a field hockey match, I realized how much I had been cheating myself and my team by not putting this effort in before.
Four years later, I was helping my parents clean after dinner when I saw the value in not taking the easy way out. Five years later, I found once again the difficult ease in pottery. Lifting the pot off the wheel, I found satisfaction. Looking back, I hadn’t realized that this notion of self-accountability appears in almost every aspect of my life.
Seven columns. Four aces. Fifty-two cards. Laying these down, I’m brought back to playing solitaire with my grandmother. Through time, her inner spirit never crumbled as her body began to deteriorate. Her mind stayed strong and proud. I admired her for that more than she could’ve imagined.
Each challenge I face, or will face, in life, I think back to her lesson one inconspicuous afternoon. Never let myself cheat. Always hold myself accountable. Work hard in every competition, especially the ones against myself, as those are the ones that better me the most. I did not understand what my grandmother meant that day. Now, with each day, I do more.
招生官點評
許多學生希望在大學論文中分享他們生活中重要的人或家庭成員。這樣做的挑戰是確保論文仍然是關于申請人的,而不僅僅是重要的人。伊麗莎白很好地融入了她的祖母這個重要的人,同時仍然把注意力集中在自己身上,她從那個特定時刻學到了什么,以及這對她的生活有何影響
伊麗莎白一開始關注的是童年經歷,但她將其帶回到了她的日常生活中,以及她如何將責任感和努力工作貫穿始終。了解伊麗莎白是誰以及她的價值觀,有助于我們了解她在校園社區中的身份。她證明了她的努力工作和自我負責的價值觀不僅限于單人紙牌游戲,還融入了運動、愛好。
作者向招生官展示了她的個性和她看重的東西。她通過事件向招生官傳達了自我負責、努力工作、自我完善的良好品質,這些是很難通過申請的其他方面看到的。
斯坦福大學
For my entire life, I have had the itch: the itch to understand.
As a kid I was obsessed with a universe I knew nothing about. In elementary school, my favorite book was an introduction to fulcrums for kids. Like the Pythagorean?who had marveled at the perfect ratios of musical notes, I was enamored with the mathematical symmetries of fulcrums. The book inflamed my itch but I had no means to scratch it.
I was raised a San Francisco Hippie by musicians and artists.?I learned to sing the blues before I knew the words I used.?Without guidance from any scientific role models, I never learned what it meant to do science, let alone differentiate science from science-fiction. As a kid, it was obvious to me a flying car was equally as plausible as a man on the moon.
When my parents told me my design for a helium filled broomstick would not fly, they could not explain why, they just knew it wouldn’t. My curiosity went unrewarded and I learned to silence my scientific mind to avoid the torture of my inability to scratch the itch.
Then, in Sophomore year, I met Kikki.?Before Kikki, “passion” was an intangible vocab term I had memorized.?Ever since she lost her best friend to cancer in middle school, she had been using her pain to fuel her passion for fighting cancer. When you spoke to her about oncology, her eyes lit up, she bounced like a child, her voice raised an octave. She emanated raw, overwhelming passion.
I wanted it. I was enviously watching another person scratch an itch I couldn’t.
I was so desperate to feel the way Kikki did that I faked feeling passionate; AP Physics 1 with Mr. Prothro had sparked my old Pythagorean wonder in mathematics so I latched on to physics as my new passion and whenever I talked about it, I made my eyes light up, made myself bounce like a child, purposefully raised my voice an octave.
Slowly, my passion emerged from pretense and envy into reality.
Without prompting, my eyes would light up, my heart would swell, and my mind would clear.?One night, I was so exhilarated to start that night's problem set that I jumped out of my seat. I forgot to sit back down.?I spent that night bent over at my desk, occasionally straightening out, walking around and visualising problems in my head.?Five whiteboards now cover my walls and every night, I do my homework standing up.
Once learning became my passion, my life changed. Old concepts gained new beauty,?the blues became a powerful medium of expression.?Mathematics became a language rather than a subject. I rocketed from the kid who cried in class while learning about negative numbers to one of two juniors in an 800-person class to skip directly into AP Physics C and AP Calculus BC.
I founded?[School]?Physics Club, which became one of the largest clubs in the school. Over the summer at Stanford, I earned perfect marks in Ordinary Differential Equations, Energy Resources, an Introduction to MATLAB, and an environmental seminar, all the while completing the Summer Environment and Water Studies Intensive.?Now in my senior year, I am earning my AS in Mathematics and Physics at the City College of San Francisco.
As I enter college, the applicability of my field of physics offers me a broad array of high-impact careers.?Given that by 2050, 17% of Bangladesh's land will be underwater displacing twenty million people, I have settled on energy resources engineering.
All of this is natural progression from one development -?I learned to scratch my itch.
招生官點評
獨特的中心隱喻:這篇文章全部基于“癢”的隱喻,代表著了解世界的渴望。通過使用中心主題(例如隱喻),您可以創建貫穿整個論文的想法線索。
具體語言和具體例子:本文沒有“講述”他們的想法,而是通過具體的軼事做了很多精彩的“展示”。像“在我知道歌詞之前我就學會了唱布魯斯……”之類的句子無需直白地表達出來,就能捕捉到很多關于作者的性格和背景的信息。
增加文學“陪襯”:在你的文章中通過描述別人來表現自己的這種方式,被稱為文學“陪襯”,通過寫你生活中的人,營造一種謙遜和諧的感覺。沒有人是一座“孤島”,這意味著每個人都會受到周圍人的影響。展示你如何從他人那里汲取靈感、價值觀或教訓,比簡單地告訴招生人員更能展示你的性格。
哈佛大學
The ?rst word I ever spoke was my name. I was intrigued that my entire identity could be attached to and compressed into such a simple sound. I would tell everyone I met that my name meant “one,” that it made me special because it sounded like “unique.” When I learned to write, I covered sheets of paper with the letters U, N, and A. Eventually, I realized that paper was not enough—I needed to cover the world with my name, my graffiti tag.
This came to a screeching halt in kindergarten. One day in music class, I scratched UNA into the piano’s wood. Everyone was surprised that I tagged my name and not someone else’s. I didn’t want someone else to suffer for my misdeeds. I wanted to take something, to make it mine.
Kindergarten was also the year my parents signed me up for piano lessons, and every aspect of them was torture. I had to learn to read an entirely new language, stretch my ?ngers to ?t challenging intervals, use my arms with enough force to sound chords but not topple over, grope around blindly while keeping my eyes on the music, and the brain-splitting feat of doing this with each hand separately. Hardest was the very act of sitting down to practice. The physical challenges were more or less surmountable, but tackling them felt lonely and pointless.
I only fell in love with music when I found myself in a sweaty church on the Upper West Side—my ?rst chamber music concert, the ?nal event of a two-week camp the summer before sixth grade. I was nervous. My group, playing a Shostakovich prelude, was the youngest, so we went ?rst. My legs shook uncontrollably before, during, and after I played. I nearly became sick afterward from shame and relief.
I was so disappointed that I thought I could never face my new music friends again. From the front row, I plotted my escape route for when the concert ?nished. But I didn’t run. I watched the whole concert. I watched the big kids breathe in unison, occupying the same disconnected body. I fell in love with music through the way they belonged to each other, the way they saw each other without even looking.
stuck with that chamber camp. In the twenty chamber groups that have made up my last six years, I’ve performed in six-inch heels and nearly fallen off-stage during my bow. I’ve performed in sneakers and a sweatshirt, on pianos with half the keys broken and the other half wildly out of tune, in subway stations, nursing homes, international orchestras, Carnegie Hall, and on Zoom.
Chamber music doesn’t work when everyone aims to be a star; it works when everyone lets everyone else shine through.
It’s more fun that way. A musical notation I rarely saw before playing chamber music is “una corda,” which says to put the soft pedal down and play on only “one string,” usually to highlight another player’s solo. I don’t need to be the loudest to breathe in unison with my friends, to create something beautiful. In that moment, I’m not just Una, I’m the pianist in the Dohnanyi sextet.
I started to love music only when I realized it doesn’t belong to me. I had to stop trying to make piano my own and take pleasure in sharing it. I learned that the rests in my part were as meaningful as the notes; that although my name means “one,” I’d rather not be the “only.”
My favorite compliment I’ve received was that I made an audience member feel like they were sitting onstage next to me. This, to me, is the essence of chamber music. To pull your audience onto the stage, trusting your group isn’t enough—you have to fuse together, to forget you exist. For a few minutes, you have to surrender your name.
招生官點評
尤娜作為一名音樂家的成長經歷使得這篇文章頗具意義。她對自己名字有力而內省的陳述立即吸引了讀者的注意力。年輕時渴望用自己的名字和涂鴉覆蓋世界,作為自我表達的一種形式,這增添了好奇心和個性的元素。
尤娜的文章通過她在不同場合的多樣化表演進一步展示了她對音樂的承諾。了解室內樂的協作本質以及她讓他人發光發熱的意愿,展示了尤娜作為音樂家的成長以及對通過團隊合作創造的美的欣賞。
文章的結尾意識到,創造美妙的音樂并不需要成為最響亮的人或明星。她接受與朋友們齊心協力的理念,并在讓別人發光發熱的過程中找到快樂。這種見解反映了她作為音樂家的成長以及她對合作和共享經驗重要性的理解。
作者成功地傳達了尤娜的個人旅程、她對音樂的熱愛,以及她對協作和無私的變革力量的理解。敘事結構、生動的描述、脆弱性、反思的基調,以及讀者感官、反思基調的融合,使文章引人入勝、富有影響力、令人難忘。
賓夕法尼亞大學
Diy smart
指導的有效文書,順利獲得賓大offer
下面給大家分享一下張同學在轉學申請中遞交的有效文書。
common app 中學校的補充問題:請說明你轉學的原因,以及你希望通過在轉學學校里獲得什么?
十一年級的道德課上,我們討論了人生的目的,老師問了我一個問題。
首先,我選擇社會學作為我的專業是為了深入了解我們是如何走到一起的,我們是如何形成的社會,以及我們如何維護社會。我想找到能創造更美好社會的解決方案。我決定參加波士頓大學,因為它有強大的社會學課程和像大衛·斯沃茨這樣的優秀教師。
然而,當我開始學習社會學時,我意識到這門學科并不符合我的期望。盡管我們教授盡最大努力將我學到的理論與現實世界的問題聯系起來,但我還是集中在概念上,這與我們作為一個社會所面臨的問題是脫節的。
我發現自己渴望更少的東西和更實質性的東西——我可以用來制作的一門學科為什么在每種文化中人們都覺得聚會很重要。除此之外,這個問題一直困擾著我和引導我討論我最初學習社會學的原因。
我小時候在廣州家的附近,不同的文化和傳統有很多共同點,但我對人們和社區偏離我們共性的地方很感興趣。我著迷于我們有如此差異仍可以和諧共存,這可能是人與人之間的沖突,真正的影響著人的變化.
在波士頓大學(Boston University),我有機會成為“商業驕傲”(Pride in Business)的一員,這是一個支持商界酷兒的俱樂部,在那里,我意識到我可以把我對社會問題的興趣與我對經濟和金融的興趣結合起來。
例如,我對人們的經濟決策所造成的社會影響很感興趣。經濟學
貫穿我們生活的方方面面,每個人都會做出財政決定,而每個決定都會產生漣漪影響著我們的社區。在賓夕法尼亞大學學習經濟學將為我提供一個更強大的工具而不是社會學,以實現我的目標,即實施有利于我和周圍人民的變革所需要。
現在,把專業轉到經濟學的決定促使我申請了不同的適合我的項目,會比波士頓大學的金融和經濟項目做得更好。
我對賓夕法尼亞大學的經濟學項目很感興趣,班級規模,這將使我能夠圍繞當代問題進行有意義的對話。我想要我的這些課程迫使我重新思考自己的知識和偏見,在經濟學中建立一套強大的工具。
此外,我在賓夕法尼亞大學的教育將使我能夠創建和支持創新項目和超越我現在在波士頓大學所受到的挑戰。過去的一年,我的課只是在擴展我現有的知識,而不是參與到品牌的新思維方式中。我相信賓夕法尼亞大學是一個可以讓我充分探索經濟學各個方面的地方指引我走向未來目標的地方。
在賓夕法尼亞大學,我可以通過創新的方式發展我的學科技能。我將站在創新的最前沿并向創業實驗室的社會創業領袖學習。沃頓強調領導力和創新使它成為我創造和支持未來可持續發展和社會項目的理想之地造福我們居住的社區。我對進入賓夕法尼亞大學的前景感到興奮,這是一個我可以做到的機構
結合我在學術之外的各種興趣,在某個地方我可以把自己淹沒在一個藝術社區同時可以繼續我的社會倡導工作。
一篇好的文書可以給招生官留下深刻印象,這些優秀文書中有很多共通之處,即在文書中充分表達自己,展示想法;不會贅述事件的始末,更加注重表達事件給予申請人的影響和感受。填補自己的空白;呈現成績單上無法體現的個性、能力以及其他新奇的情況。展示對生活的熱情、思考和好奇心等,全面映射出申請者是一個多面靈動的個體。

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