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(xiàn)“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(yōu)秀的文書通常需要1-2個月的時間仔細(xì)打磨,反復(fù)潤色,才能達(dá)到字字珠璣的效果,所以其重要程度顯而易見。
一個標(biāo)化成績優(yōu)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(yōu)秀文書,對正在準(zhǔn)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(diǎn)評
許多學(xué)生希望在大學(xué)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(zhàn)是確保論文仍然是關(guān)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(xué)到了什么,以及這對她的生活有何影響
伊麗莎白一開始關(guān)注的是童年經(jīng)歷,但她將其帶回到了她的日常生活中,以及她如何將責(zé)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(qū)中的身份。她證明了她的努力工作和自我負(fù)責(zé)的價值觀不僅限于單人紙牌游戲,還融入了運(yùn)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(dá)了自我負(fù)責(zé)、努力工作、自我完善的良好品質(zhì),這些是很難通過申請的其他方面看到的。
斯坦福大學(xué)
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(diǎn)評
獨(dú)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(chuàng)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(xué)會了唱布魯斯……”之類的句子無需直白地表達(dá)出來,就能捕捉到很多關(guān)于作者的性格和背景的信息。
增加文學(xué)“陪襯”:在你的文章中通過描述別人來表現(xiàn)自己的這種方式,被稱為文學(xué)“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(xùn),比簡單地告訴招生人員更能展示你的性格。
哈佛大學(xué)
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(diǎn)評
尤娜作為一名音樂家的成長經(jīng)歷使得這篇文章頗具意義。她對自己名字有力而內(nèi)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(dá)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(jìn)一步展示了她對音樂的承諾。了解室內(nèi)樂的協(xié)作本質(zhì)以及她讓他人發(fā)光發(fā)熱的意愿,展示了尤娜作為音樂家的成長以及對通過團(tuán)隊(duì)合作創(chuàng)造的美的欣賞。
文章的結(jié)尾意識到,創(chuàng)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(xié)力的理念,并在讓別人發(fā)光發(fā)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(jīng)驗(yàn)重要性的理解。
作者成功地傳達(dá)了尤娜的個人旅程、她對音樂的熱愛,以及她對協(xié)作和無私的變革力量的理解。敘事結(jié)構(gòu)、生動的描述、脆弱性、反思的基調(diào),以及讀者感官、反思基調(diào)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(xué)
Diy smart
指導(dǎo)的有效文書,順利獲得賓大offer
下面給大家分享一下張同學(xué)在轉(zhuǎn)學(xué)申請中遞交的有效文書。
common app 中學(xué)校的補(bǔ)充問題:請說明你轉(zhuǎn)學(xué)的原因,以及你希望通過在轉(zhuǎn)學(xué)學(xué)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(xué)作為我的專業(yè)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?nèi)绾尉S護(hù)社會。我想找到能創(chuàng)造更美好社會的解決方案。我決定參加波士頓大學(xué),因?yàn)樗袕?qiáng)大的社會學(xué)課程和像大衛(wèi)·斯沃茨這樣的優(yōu)秀教師。
然而,當(dāng)我開始學(xué)習(xí)社會學(xué)時,我意識到這門學(xué)科并不符合我的期望。盡管我們教授盡最大努力將我學(xué)到的理論與現(xiàn)實(shí)世界的問題聯(lián)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(jié)的。
我發(fā)現(xiàn)自己渴望更少的東西和更實(shí)質(zhì)性的東西——我可以用來制作的一門學(xué)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(dǎo)我討論我最初學(xué)習(xí)社會學(xué)的原因。
我小時候在廣州家的附近,不同的文化和傳統(tǒng)有很多共同點(diǎn),但我對人們和社區(qū)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(xué)(Boston University),我有機(jī)會成為“商業(yè)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(jīng)濟(jì)和金融的興趣結(jié)合起來。
例如,我對人們的經(jīng)濟(jì)決策所造成的社會影響很感興趣。經(jīng)濟(jì)學(xué)
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(chǎn)生漣漪影響著我們的社區(qū)。在賓夕法尼亞大學(xué)學(xué)習(xí)經(jīng)濟(jì)學(xué)將為我提供一個更強(qiáng)大的工具而不是社會學(xué),以實(shí)現(xiàn)我的目標(biāo),即實(shí)施有利于我和周圍人民的變革所需要。
現(xiàn)在,把專業(yè)轉(zhuǎn)到經(jīng)濟(jì)學(xué)的決定促使我申請了不同的適合我的項(xiàng)目,會比波士頓大學(xué)的金融和經(jīng)濟(jì)項(xiàng)目做得更好。
我對賓夕法尼亞大學(xué)的經(jīng)濟(jì)學(xué)項(xiàng)目很感興趣,班級規(guī)模,這將使我能夠圍繞當(dāng)代問題進(jìn)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(jīng)濟(jì)學(xué)中建立一套強(qiáng)大的工具。
此外,我在賓夕法尼亞大學(xué)的教育將使我能夠創(chuàng)建和支持創(chuàng)新項(xiàng)目和超越我現(xiàn)在在波士頓大學(xué)所受到的挑戰(zhàn)。過去的一年,我的課只是在擴(kuò)展我現(xiàn)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(xué)是一個可以讓我充分探索經(jīng)濟(jì)學(xué)各個方面的地方指引我走向未來目標(biāo)的地方。
在賓夕法尼亞大學(xué),我可以通過創(chuàng)新的方式發(fā)展我的學(xué)科技能。我將站在創(chuàng)新的最前沿并向創(chuàng)業(yè)實(shí)驗(yàn)室的社會創(chuàng)業(yè)領(lǐng)袖學(xué)習(xí)。沃頓強(qiáng)調(diào)領(lǐng)導(dǎo)力和創(chuàng)新使它成為我創(chuàng)造和支持未來可持續(xù)發(fā)展和社會項(xiàng)目的理想之地造福我們居住的社區(qū)。我對進(jìn)入賓夕法尼亞大學(xué)的前景感到興奮,這是一個我可以做到的機(jī)構(gòu)
結(jié)合我在學(xué)術(shù)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(shù)社區(qū)同時可以繼續(xù)我的社會倡導(dǎo)工作。
一篇好的文書可以給招生官留下深刻印象,這些優(yōu)秀文書中有很多共通之處,即在文書中充分表達(dá)自己,展示想法;不會贅述事件的始末,更加注重表達(dá)事件給予申請人的影響和感受。填補(bǔ)自己的空白;呈現(xiàn)成績單上無法體現(xiàn)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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