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20//Aries//INFP Second Year Economics Student UK

[betterself]

coffee shop study dates with friends are the best type of study dates. even if it seemed like the owners weren't very happy to see our spread.

[eliteprepsat]

Being over the word limit on your college essay is a great problem to have. All writing requires revision, and almost all revision entails condensing. Your aim in cutting down an admission essay is to say as much as possible with as few words as possible.

Whatever you do, don’t try to game the system by hyphenating a ton of words (“My-story-begins-in-2002…”) or using white underscores. There’s a good chance that the software will truncate your essay despite these tactics.

When trimming away, keep in mind that your readers don’t have the time or energy to read carefully. You need to respect your reader’s time—don’t drone on unnecessarily, and always ask yourself if you could say the same thing with fewer words.

Here are some strategies for condensing:

1. Revise the Passive Voice

You may have heard at some point to avoid the passive voice. Or maybe, if your teacher put things more simply, you were told to avoid “to be” verbs altogether. There are smart and meaningful uses of the passive voice, but one of its primary drawbacks is that it usually produces more words than the active voice.

Consider these examples:

Passive: Ice cream was eaten by everyone in my family.

Active: Everyone in my family ate ice cream.

Passive: Hard work has been proven to be much more important than natural talent by researchers.

Active: Researchers have proven that hard work is much more important than natural talent.

The active sentences are more concise and more direct. An easy way to spot the passive voice is to look for “by” phrases (though that’s no guarantee a sentence is passive, and not all passive sentences use “by” phrases). A more exacting method is to locate unnecessary “to be” verbs (such as “was” in sentence 1 and “has been” in sentence 2.

In general, place the subject of the sentence at the beginning (“Everyone” and “Researchers”) and you’re likely to avoid the awkwardness and wordiness that we often find in the passive voice.

2. Minimize Background Information

When I write, I often feel the urge to write so much before I get to the heart of the matter. “How can my reader understand what I need to say until I tell them all this background information first?” Fight that impulse as much as possible. Background information tries your readers’ patience.

Consider the opening of this essay by Alison Hess, who recently gained admission to the University of Chicago:

I always assumed my father wished I had been born a boy.

Now, please don’t assume that my father is some rampant rural sexist. The fact is, when you live in an area and have a career where success is largely determined by your ability to provide and maintain nearly insurmountable feats of physical labor, you typically prefer a person with a bigger frame.

When I was younger, I liked green tractors better than red tractors because that was what my father drove, and I preferred black and white cows over brown ones because those were the kind he raised.

The writer leaps directly into the primary conflict of her essay, then zooms out briefly to explain its rural context, then zooms back into concrete images from her childhood. The essay keeps us locked into a sequence of revealing moments and images that fuel the writer’s reflection on gender identity and farming (it’s a fascinating piece—go read it!).

3. Are You Sure You Need All of those Adjectives and Adverbs?

Many really smart and talented high school students write sentences like this one, believing that maximum description is always best:

I quizzically wandered through the long, hollow, silent hallway, hopelessly wondering where my extremely alacritous dog was hiding.

If you’re this kind of writer, try to channel that passion for words more selectively. Consider this revision:

I wandered through the quiet hallway, wondering where my dog was hiding.

This is a fine sentence. In fact, it’s better than the first because it is not filled with distracting details. Whenever you add adverbs and adjectives, you deepen your description of nouns, which is a great strategy only when used selectively.

Always ask yourself: what work is the adjective/adverb doing?

Only include those descriptors that help your reader learn essential information directly related to the argument you’re building in your essay.

More generally, beware of intensifying words such as “extremely,” “very,” and “really,” which usually just dilute sentences.

Here are some other quick tips on condensing:

4. Use Contractions and Abbreviations

For your college admission essays, “don’t” is just as good as “do not” and “the US” is a fine substitute for “the United States of America.”

5. Avoid Repetitions and Reiterations

Really want to get a point across? Don’t repeat it—you don’t have space. Write it once and write it well. Consider making it into a one-sentence paragraph like the one that opens Alison Hess’s essay.

6. Ask For Help

It can be very difficult, sometimes impossible, to trim down your own work. Ask a friend or a teacher for help. Sometimes another set of eyes are necessary for you to see that that one sentence you thought was just so clever was actually not all that great or necessary.

One last tip: save everything! Your words are precious jewels. When you discard them from one document, make sure to save them somewhere else. They just might need to make their way back into the final version.

[jeparletoutesleslangues]

✨The language learning tip you have not heard (works for all written languages)

The tip: Copy down (entire) passages of text

Why it works: You get WRITING SKILLS since you are writing down every word. You become familiar with the spelling, grammar, different writing styles, script (if you are unfamiliar with it), etc. You get READING SKILLS because obviously you are reading, exposed to the written text in context. You can even incorporate SPEAKING and LISTENING SKILLS by listen to the audio format (you can try google translate audio if you find nothing else) and/or read it aloud to yourself. Since you are limited by the speed of your writing, you will pay more attention to pronunciation. *Also, everyone knows you retain more information when you write by hand.*

How to:

1. Select a text. Make sure it is appropriate to your level and desired new vocabulary set. If I want to know more political vocabulary, I will read a news article. But for colloquial language/slang, I will read a YA novel.

(Btw you can find tons of texts for novels online if you search: “title name” + pdf)

2. Get a paper and writing utensil (you can dedicate a notebook to this if you want).

3. Don’t stop until the text is done or your hand hurts

4. Limit looking up vocabulary. If the text is more challenging for you, allow yourself to look up about one word per paragraph. If it is at your level, then wait to the end of the session to open the dictionary. Chances are, you’ll figure out the word’s meaning a few lines later.

4. Go back to the text later to review and/or make vocabulary lists from what you learned (flashcards like anki or memrise would be great especially if you put the sentence on one side with the word indicated and a representative picture on the other side

Ex. Side one: I planted a *rose* today

Side two: picture of a rose in a pot)

**btw I don’t know if this is an “undiscovered” method. I used this to learn spelling and writing structures in my native language when I was little. I would even put the writing right in my picture books**

[bright-goals-deactivated2022103]

27.10.19 || taking notes

I survived the 1st week of the semester and my god it was stressful. This semester I want to start studying as soon as possible to avoid bulimic learning later 🍁

[cardiganstudies]

healthy breakfasts and geography notes

[studyblr]

study tip: don‘t think about studying as something you need to do. that implies it’s some tedious process, something you can’t really enjoy, just another task ruining your day. rather, try to enjoy the process. think of yourself as someone who loves the subject, who loves studying for the sake of learning. you’re someone for whom studying comes easily, it’s just another good part of your day. if you change your identity and sense of self from someone who struggles with studying or with a particular task, it will be much easier to get done, as we always strive to stay consistent with who we think we are. think of yourself as a productive person, and it's much easier to act like a productive person would.

[bright-goals-deactivated2022103]

02.08.19 || study session in the library 📚📚

[libraerie]

ok so last minute decision (as always) to celebrate the best month of the year + my birthday month i’ll try and write 1 fragment of a poem per day for the next 31 days & post it here (((i’m not willing to do 1 poem per day bc i know that i can’t just blurt out a decent poem in one take & i’ll be ridiculously busy this month … but a fragment is totally manageable … i think)))

i’ll tag them as #autumnfragments so if you’d like to join in (any day + any length is ok!) feel free to do so as well 🍁🍂🍃

[studyblr]

Is there a skill you’ve always wanted to master someday, but kept procrastinating on? A language you started learning – then abandoned? A topic in class you’ve never quite grasped? Or maybe you just want to expand your horizon and try something new? Distract yourself from your usual studies?

This challenge is the perfect opportunity to achieve that! Pick a skill and see how much you can improve and grow in 30 days – or really start working on your to-read list (I know those books have been piling up), your portfolio for that dream job in Illustration you want, or your blog you’ve been meaning to post more original content on.

Self-growth and development are so, so important, which is the main reason why I created this challenge.

The idea of this challenge is that people from all communities come together to gain knowledge, add skills and just have fun with the amazing amount of resources out there. This way, we can all support and motivate each other, whatever field you might be interested in.

Post an introduction with the hashtag #30dol with your goals and expectations for the month, and what your current level is. (Of course, you can join in later as well, but it’s fun to start a the same time!) In the end, you’ll be able to compare and see how much has changed!

Rules:

choose a topic or field you want to concentrate on

post an introduction to #30dol 

define your goals or aspirations

update daily or weekly, we want to hear from you! ♥

post a picture, a sketch, or audio, whatever you deem fitting to show us all your progress for the day/week

Here are some ideas for you:

bullet journaling (read about it here on @emmastudies, here’s an amazing online course on it) 

books/reading (if you don’t have a personal to-read list, here is one with the best books of the 20th century, best series with a gay plot/subplot, and books everyone should have read at least once)

coding (here are some sites to learn html, css, data science, python 3, java, etc.: x x x x)

design/illustration ( stickers and illustration, character illustration, Ink Illustration, 45 best adobe illustrator tutorials, 

business/freelance/open your own shop (tips on how to open your own sticker shop, digital skills: web analytics and marketing)

languages (apps like lingodeer, duolingo, lingvist, busuu, blogs like @lovelybluepanda. there are also so many pdfs and amazing websites out there depending on your target language!)

online mass education courses (edx, coursera, skillshare, futurelearn where universities and professionals teach you about their subject - be that astronomy, engineering, ancient greek history, artificial intelligence or medicine!)

social media (learn to take iphone photos for your tumblr or instagram, and here’s a great post by @studyquill on how to start and maintain a studyblr!)

photography (travel street photography, find photographers you admire like annie leibovitz or henri cartier bresson and read about their path, or browse youtube channels like negative feedback which specialize on photography)

creative writing (there are tons of workshops online - you could also try to set yourself a piece or word limit similar to nanowrimo) 

culinary (check recipe websites, or challenge yourself to try one new recipe a day, or dedicate the month to a specific cuisine)

music (learn music production, andrew huang has also made a video on how to start making music here)

film and filmmaking (karsten runquist’s channel is wonderful for film analysis,  learn about cinematography basics here and film history here)

painting (acrylic painting, sketchbook illustration. you could challenge yourself to fill an entire sketchbook/create a piece every day or week, or to improve a specific technique) 

Every resource linked is free (if you click on the links you can get Skillshare for free for two months and cancel anytime), so all you need is some free time and lots of motivation!!

I’m very happy to be announcing this to you all, and will be working on my Japanese for this challenge – so excited to see what you all and I will do and how far we can come!

Use #30dol as the general tag, and add your field (your specific subject, or writing, painting, lang(uages), pho(tography), film, book, design) to find people doing something similar! Though honestly one of the things I’m most excited about is the multidisciplinary aspect - we are such a brilliant and colorful community :)

Have fun guys!!

[studyblr]

bringing this back for October!!

[latenights]

Allow yourself to be a beginner. No one starts off being excellent.

[huitingreads]

i’m starting a habit of journaling daily

[bienstudies]

feb 14/2019

happy valentine’s day, everyone! whether you celebrate today or not, i hereby send you some extra love just in case - on a side note, i am in love with how the light falls in my room atm it’s just so gorgeous ✨

[coffeemlk]

quizlet is LITERALLY saving my grades right now!!!

[coffeeandpies-deactivated202012]

290919 // consumerist study aesthetic wow

[awalkingpoem]

That unstoppable girl that you’re envisioning, you’re her. She’s you. Go be her!

[englishgradinrepair]

foggy essay writing vibes 

[acataemic]

april 8th, 10:33 pm took these in my favourite co-working space !! u kno i dont think i’ve actually posted photos of my mossery planner before huh ! i’m so excited for this week to be over and to finally be on break !! my geo ia is due tomorrow night so ! let’s stay strong for that !! stay safe everyone and remember to take healthy breaks when you’re working !! c:

find me on instagram at acataemic !!