留学书信-研究生院申请文章—用词过多

anthropology. His complicating of the traditionally drawn local, national and foreign realms through the discussion of post-colonial displacement and mixed identifications first led me to believe that comparative literature''s focus on national and linguistic borders was fairly arbitrary in the modern world. Much more significant is the accurate rendering of individual lived realities that may then be synthesized with other experiences. I believe that I could greatly benefit from his teaching and guidance in applying these ideas to the literary arena. I am also eager to learn from many other scholars in the department, contribute to a vital academic and practical discourse, and venture down paths that I may, as yet, not have imagined.


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Critique

Dear XXX,

You are, no doubt, a strong and vivid writer, yet the essay did indeed contain a few weak points, as well as a number of information gaps.

The personal statement was structurally solid, but your tendency to "over-write" sentences times obscured the meaning of what you were trying to express. You managed to pack a lot of information into the piece; my job, then, was to draw on this information in order to clarify your ideas by both refining your language and shoring up your arguments.

Regarding the info gaps: there were a number of questions that popped into my head as I read your essay. Naturally, the answers to some of these will be clear from the remainder of your application, but as a rule of thumb (and for the sake of clarity) it''s best to make the essay as self-contained and thorough as possible.

When did you graduate, and what have you been doing since? Why did you take this job? How does this experience relate to your academic experiences and goals? What degree program are you applying to? Why do you want to pursue this degree? Do you want to become a professor?

In revising your essay, I attempted to blend in answers to these questions into the text. I left blanks here and there where you should fill in simple facts, but in general I tried to extrapolate answers from your note and original essay.

Elsewhere, rather than make radical (and unnecessary) structural changes, I concentrated on refining your language, highlighting your most interesting ideas, and streamlining the logic of your arguments. Many of these changes are quite subtle, but they have a powerful impact on the overall flow of the text.

I rephrased passages that contained awkward English, eliminated words that seemed extraneous or repetitive, and in a couple of spots varied the vocabulary and the length of sentences.

I took notes on the more substantial changes (they do not reflect nearly all the changes), as well as certain passages that you might want to consider elaborating on (by paragraph):

NOTES

General

Some of the paragraphs were unnecessarily long. I broke them up into separate paragraphs.

P1

RE: " He argued that, when a civilization adopts reading and writing as the chief form of social communication, it truly frees itself to forget its own values, because those values no longer have to be part of a lived reality in order to have significance."

You might want to consider rewriting this sentence to make the meaning a little clearer -- I found it rather confusing, perhaps because you are trying to convey an epiphany involving a rather complicated concept in a single sentence. This might, of course, be not much of a problem for an academic well-versed in such theories, but in general it''s good to set layman''s comprehension as your standard for clear writing.

P4

Are you sure you don''t need to identify p''Bitek? Is it safe to assume that your readers will all know who he is?

P5

I added a paragraph. As I mentioned earlier, what was missing in the essay was your take on your work experience, and the challenge there was how to bridge the gap from your otherwise highly theoretical/academic explanations with the more concrete stuff (especially why you left academe to work for a while, and why you now want to go back to the books). I tried to make the transition smooth by connecting the two ideas, especially at the beginning of this paragraph. Since I have no idea what you have done since you graduated, or for how long, I simply plugged in randomly made-up info. ( Well, not so random, actually -- it''s what I myself used to do before I left my own dynamic, high-pay-prospects job to attend grad school.)

P6

RE: "...methods of inquiry can be formulated that allow for the interpretation of works that are both technically sound and sociologically insightful"

This part of the sen

tence was very confusing. Do you mean that the *interp

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