Example of college essay in the US

[TWRule]

Really, who cares? "Writing", as defined by colleges, is entirely pointless outside college, with the exception of a very small number of professions. We're not talking about being able to put language on paper, you learn that proficiently by like 5th grade.

It's just a collection of rules that only exist for their own sake. They serve no ultimate purpose other than testing to see if a person can follow a set of arbitrary rules imposed for no apparent reason.

College "English" is run by a collection of hipsters that think they have some authority over an entire language. At best it's silly, realistically it's pathetic.

No apparent reason.

Apart from readability, analytical skills, the ability to collect and present peer-reviewed ands credible evidence, express an argument properly, and (in terms of formatting) allow for the marking of your work in order to improve the aforementioned skills further?

Which is useful in exactly how many professions? Two? No, three.

As a general education requirement, it's just another easy dollar for the college.

Writing is important because the ability to express one's ideas is important. There's a very close link between one's ability to write clearly/concisely, and one's abilities to think or speak that way. Writing is one of the most common exercises in critical thinking and communication skills, which are used in nearly every aspect of human life.

Don't forget that writing prevents cancer and cures colds.

What you are trying to say is that people who communicate better will communicate better than people who don't. Correlation =/= causation.

No need for the strawman. You'll notice that I said a link, not necessarily a causal link.

 

[sansamour14]

ooops wrong topic sorry

 

[Hader]

That was poorly written. Personal ramblings of this nature in a high level essay? Quite sad. Though in my freshmen writing comp class in college, I actually have seen worse.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

It really doesn't surprise me ._. We're rushed through like we're on a factory assembly line so that we can get good grades on standardized tests. Possibly worse than having laughably awful essays is being -aware- of how laughably awful they are.

...'cause then you have to read what you write, and it friggin' hurts. You know it's wrong, but the foundation that your writing's built on is so flimsy that you don't even know where to start to fix it. And admitting fault is not the American way, so you just keep proudly charging ahead.

And speaking as someone who roleplays, you can always identify how old someone is and if they come from America or not. I'll type up roughly a page in Microsoft Word that covers the setting and the character, and then my partner will flip the fuck out because it's so -long-. Excuse me? You're roleplaying, you're supposed to -want- to read and then presumably write >_> If a bloody page of reading is too much to handle, then something has gone horribly wrong.

All in all, I can always tell which teachers are completely defeated, because I can utterly ignore whatever they required and write less than they wanted and still get an A or B just for not writing utter shit.

This is the truth. Speaking as a product of that standardized test assembly line, the American education system spends elementary and middle school teaching students bad habits so that they can match up to a test which requires a highly artificial essay format, and then spends the highschool and early college years trying to break those bad habits. More often than not, it doesn't happen. I can't count the number of times I've proofread a paper which has contained the phrase "let me tell you about..." which is terrible form, but is explicitly taught as the right way to do things in elementary school. This is the result of high stakes testing.