Jokes > Hugh Gallagher's 'College Essay' It seems that Hugh Gallagher wrote this for a national writing contest, and that an Urban Legend has since arisen that he wrote it as an actual application essay. 18 June 1998, update. Hugh Gallagher emailed me(!) , and said: "I was happy to see my college essay on your site (by the the way, I did send it to colleges)".
So that's that Urban Legend laid to rest, then? He also said "... and my first novel, Teeth, was published by Pocket Books this Spring. ... It's a coming of age tale about a guy with really messed up teeth, who goes travelling around the world instead of fixing his mouth. " I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. Art & Copy. The Age of the Essay. September 2004 Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in Moby Dick was a Christ-like figure. Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and how you write one.
Mods The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. With the result that writing is made to seem boring and pointless. How did things get this way? During this period the study of ancient texts acquired great prestige. The time was then ripe for the question: if the study of ancient texts is a valid field for scholarship, why not modern texts? And so began the study of modern literature. What tipped the scales, at least in the US, seems to have been the idea that professors should do research as well as teach. Writing was one of the casualties. No Defense Notes. Writing, Briefly. March 2005 (In the process of answering an email, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay about writing.
I usually spend weeks on an essay. This one took 67 minutes—23 of writing, and 44 of rewriting.) I think it's far more important to write well than most people realize. ISSUE 74: Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here?