Posted September 7, 2008

This fall, hundreds of thousands of high school students will attempt to get into a handful of top colleges. These top colleges take their educational role very seriously. as demonstrated by the festive banners they drape across their ivy-covered campuses, welcoming prospective students with the words, "Who Needs You?"

This is the first of an endless string of roadblocks on the way to getting into a top college. Others include grades, SAT scores, letters of recommendation, interviews, wardrobe choices, dumb pictures on MySpace pages and tuition so high it has to be cleared with the FAA.

Then there's the personal essay.

In the personal essay, high school students are asked to reveal themselves by writing about insights that most of us wouldn't have even if Sigmund Freud were our brother-in-law.

What's worse, students are expected to spell out every single word because, and this is a low blow, students can't submit their essays as text messages.

No wonder so many of our fine young people have decided to forgo college for a career in the hospitality industry (Hint: Would you like fries with that?).

As a professional writer I feel a responsibility to help students achieve their dreams. I will use a real, live college application question to demonstrate the many rhetorical enhancements one can use to write a personal essay that is sure to make even the most jaded essay reader rise up from his or her chair and say, "My goodness, this student is a human rhetorical enhancement machine."

Real Live College Application Question: If you could have dinner with any person, real or imagined, living or dead, who would it be and why?

SAMPLE ESSAY

If I could have dinner with any person, real or imagined, living or dead, I would have dinner with Sylvan Goldman. (Enhancement #1: Always restate the question in your first sentence. This way, a tired college employee will know what question you are answering. Also, you get a whole bunch of words for free, meaning less for you to make up.)

Sylvan Goldman invented the shopping cart. He did this in 1937 to make more money at a supermarket he owned named Piggly Wiggly. He must be pretty cool, since someone else would have just changed the name to something more rad, like "Winn Dixie Chicks." Instead, he decided to invent something. This is the sort of thing I would do. (Enhancement #2: Colleges like students with life goals that reach beyond growing the perfect Brad Pitt stubble.)

One time, Mr. Goldman, I saw these old pictures on Google of people in suits and dresses walking through your store carrying little baskets over their arms. I bet that when these people passed each other in an aisle this is what they said:

MAN: Excuse me.

OTHER MAN: Oh, no, excuse me.

MAN: No, really, it was me.

OTHER MAN: Don't be silly.

They would do this until they noticed their ice cream was dripping down their pants and then move on.

Thanks to your invention, it's more like this:

MAN: Get your cart out of my way.

OTHER MAN: Yo, you get your cart out of my way.

MAN: No way.

OTHER MAN: Way.

MAN: No way, your way.

They do this until they notice their ice cream is dripping down their pants, at which point they sue each other. (Enhancement #3: Colleges are always looking for students who understand the democratic process.)

Did you figure out that would happen?

Did you also invent "Clean up on aisle seven?"

I, too, have known the hardship of using a shopping cart.(Enhancement #4: Tragedy sells.) I had to do all the family shopping when my father ran away from home and my mother drowned her sorrows in a bottle of Cherry Dr. Pepper. (Enhancement #5: Big tragedy sells big.)

Since then I've been wondering. Whose idea was it to let the wheels on your shopping cart move in all directions? Usually all at once?

Yours?

To go anywhere, I have to fool the shopping cart by saying something like, "Oh, hum, I guess I'll head over to the granola aisle now," take two steps that way, then quickly take a step back, spin around, and head to the double Cheez Whiz nachos, which is what I really want.

It's a lot of work and it makes me look like a white kid trying to dance to Aretha Franklin. (Enhancement #6: Always play to your audience. No self-respecting 18-year-old dances to Aretha Franklin, but the guy reading your essay probably wouldn't know Ludacris from a jar of prune droppings.)

Did you think of this by yourself?

What were your SAT scores?

I want you to know that I learned a lot of math from your invention. (Enhancement #7: Take the opportunity to show that you learned something in high school, regardless of what your grades say.)

For example, I know that the modern supermarket aisle is exactly as wide as two shopping carts minus three inches. And that, in some big supermarkets, three shopping carts can pass along side each other at once if one of them can fold itself up into the fourth dimension.

I guess I learned some physics, too. (Enhancement #8: See Enhancement #7.)

Do you have the Internet where you live?

My Uncle Harry told me that he read on snopes.com that if a man hangs bananas from his shopping cart he is interested in meeting a woman for some activities that would give a whole new meaning to the words "banana split."

Were you thinking about this while you were inventing? Is there a Mrs. Goldman? Was she the one who came up with the idea that women who like banana splits should put pineapples in their carts?

I'll bet you two were a really cute couple.

Do you think I should go to Harvard or Princeton?

By the way, Uncle Harry is not really my uncle. Mom just likes me to call him that.

THE END

By following this simple example aspiring college students can, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, go confidently in the direction of their dreams and live the lives they've imagined.

As long as they don't imagine I'll also help with the tuition.

©2008 Jay Douglas