How to Answer Questions about Accomplishments

The goal in answering this kind of question is to analyze rather than summarize an achievement. This advice is particularly true if youre discussing an accomplishment that is listed elsewhere on the application. Your readers want to gain insight into your character—not read a factual summary of what occurred.Here are some guiding principles to use in constructing your answer:Choose something thats meaningful to you.  Some applicants feel obligated to choose the most objectively impressive accomplishments. You should write about something that has personal significance, even if you werent formally recognized for it. What matters is that you write passionately and insightfully about your subject. Unless otherwise specified, you should feel free to draw on academic, personal, or professional successes.Focus on details about the process.  Show the reader through concrete details how you achieved what you did. If you want to discuss a grade you earned in a particularly challeng ing class, show us how you mastered the material. For example, describe creative strategies you used; dont rely on clichà ©s like I succeeded through hard work.Build tension. Describe obstacles and how you overcame them.  Note initial difficulties or intermediate failures, and show how you recovered. By adding a sense of drama to your story, you not only keep the reader interested, but you also make the accomplishment seem that much more significant.Evaluate the significance of the accomplishment.  Again, the goal here is to add insight beyond what the reader knows from the straightforward facts. For example, you can comment on how the accomplishment represents an aspect of your character, or describe how it fits within your background of successes and failures. Dont get carried away, however, and try to draw overly grand lessons. You might discuss external consequences of your actions to convey their magnitude, but ultimately you should stay focused on your personal response.D ont boast or be overly modest.  This is a hard balance to strike, but if you stay focused on the details of your story, then you shouldnt have a problem. Use the details to convey the magnitude of your accomplishment; you should be able to do so sincerely without having to promote yourself. For example, if you can show through illustrative evidence how you influenced the course of someones life, you wont have to make a presumptuous statement about, for example, having a profound impact on the life of another.This applicant  discusses three accomplishments. The first is a professional achievement with specific details both about the difficulties he encountered and the contributions he made. His second accomplishment comes from his involvement in his community. Note that he makes the following unnecessary statement: This experience was remarkable because it afforded me the privilege of making a positive difference in the lives of others. Although this is certainly true, the writer would be better off showing the difference he has made. Nevertheless, the overall account is still strong, because he does return to focus on specific duties he had and results for which he was responsible.His final accomplishment falls under a personal achievement. Note that he is able to avoid sounding boastful by acknowledging but downplaying praise: My act was heralded in the newspapers and recognized by a citation from the highway patrol and the county in which the event occurred, but this hardly equaled the feeling I received from having saved this boys life. Few of us have been involved in saving another persons life, but this story provides a strong model of engaging dramatic narration and effective use of detail. The writer does not need to spend many words evaluating the significance of his story, because the details have already revealed so much to the reader about his character.

Definition and Examples of Copyediting in English

Definition and Examples of Copyediting in English Copyediting is the process of correcting errors in a text and making it conform to an editorial style (also called house style), which includes spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. A person who prepares a text for publication by performing these tasks is called a copy editor (or in Britain, a sub editor). Alternate Spellings:  copy editing, copy-editing Aims and Kinds of Copyediting The main aims of copy-editing are to remove any obstacles between the reader and what the author wants to convey and to find and solve any problems before the book goes to the typesetter, so that production can go ahead without interruption or unnecessary expense. . . . There are various kinds of editing.   Substantive editing  aims to improve the overall coverage and presentation of a piece of writing, its content, scope,  level  and organization. . . .Detailed editing for sense  is concerned with whether each section expresses the authors meaning clearly, without gaps and contradictions.Checking for consistency  is a mechanical but important task. . . . It involves checking such things as spelling and the use of single or double quotes, either according to a house style or according to the authors own style. . . .Copy-editing usually consists of 2 and 3, plus 4 below.Clear presentation of the material for the typesetter  involves making sure that it is complete and that all the parts are clearly identified. (Judith Butcher, Caroline Drake, and Maureen Leach, Butchers Copy-editing: The Cambridge Handbook for Editors, Copy-editors and Proofreaders. Cambridge University Press, 2006) How Its Spelled Copyeditor and copyediting have a curious history. Random House is my authority for using the one-word form. But Websters agrees with Oxford on copy editor, although Websters favors copyedit as a verb. They both sanction copyreader and copywriter, with verbs to match. (Elsie Myers Stainton, The Fine Art of Copyediting. Columbia University Press, 2002) The Work of Copy Editors Copy editors are the final gatekeepers before an article reaches you, the reader. To start with, they want to be sure that the spelling and grammar are correct, following our [New York Times] stylebook, of course. . . . They have great instincts for sniffing out suspicious or incorrect facts or things that just dont make sense in context. They are also our final line of protection against libel, unfairness and imbalance in an article. If they stumble over anything, theyre going to work with the writer or the assigning editor (we call them backfield editors) to make adjustments so you dont stumble. That often involves intensive substantive work on an article. In addition, copy editors write the headlines, captions and other display elements for the articles, edit the article for the space available to it (that usually means trims, for the printed paper) and read the proofs of the printed pages in case something slipped by. (Merrill Perlman, Talk to the Newsroom. The New York Times, Ma r. 6, 2007) Julian Barnes on the Style Police For five years in the 1990s, British novelist and essayist  Julian Barnes  served as the London correspondent for  Ã¢â‚¬â€¹The New Yorker magazine. In the preface to  Letters From London, Barnes describes how his essays were meticulously clipped and styled by editors and fact-checkers at the magazine. Here he reports on the activities of the anonymous  copy editors, whom he calls  the style police. Writing for  The New Yorker  means, famously, being edited by  The New Yorker: an immensely civilized, attentive and beneficial process which tends to drive you crazy. It begins with the department known, not always affectionately, as the style police. These are the stern puritans who look at one of your sentences and instead of seeing, as you do, a joyful fusion of truth, beauty, rhythm, and wit, discover only a doltish wreckage of capsized grammar. Silently, they do their best to protect you from yourself. You emit muted gargles of protest and attempt to restore your original text. A new set of proofs arrives, and occasionally you will have been graciously permitted a single laxity; but if so, you will also find that a further grammatical delinquency has been corrected. The fact that you never get to talk to the style police, while they retain the power of intervention in your text at any time, makes them seem the more menacing. I used to imagine them sitting in their office with nightsticks and manacles dangling from the walls, swapping satirical and unforgiving opinions of  New Yorker  writers. Guess how many infinitives that Limeys split  this  time? Actually, they are less unbending than I make them sound, and even acknowledge how useful it may be to occasionally split an infinitive. My own particular weakness is a refusal to learn the difference between  which  and  that. I know theres some rule, to do with individuality versus category or something, but I have my ow n rule, which goes like this (or should it be that goes like this?dont ask me): if youve already got a  that  doing business in the vicinity, use  which  instead. I dont think I ever converted the style police to this working principle. (Julian Barnes, Letters From London. Vintage, 1995)   The Decline of Copyediting The brutal fact is that American newspapers, coping with drastically shrinking revenue, have drastically reduced the levels of editing, with a concomitant increase in errors, slipshod writing, and other defects. Copy editing, in particular, was seen at the corporate level as a cost center, an expensive frill, money wasted on people obsessing with commas. Copy desk staffs have been decimated, more than once, or eliminated outright with the work transferred to distant hubs, where, unlike Cheers, nobody knows your name. (John McIntyre, Gag Me With a Copy Editor. The Baltimore Sun, January 9, 2012)