Writing (and Rewriting) My Essay

Click here if you want to see my essay.

Writing, Generally Speaking

I have a love-hate relationship with writing. When you're in the "zone", it's something that you just can't stop doing. The words just flow right into whatever medium it is that you're using. But when you're not in said zone, it's the last thing that you'd want to do. I've felt this ebb and flow numerous times before when I'm writing my position paper or when I'm writing about things I did in this site.

Most of the time when I'm writing, I already know what I want to convey. I already know what I want the reader to understand and comprehend when my writing is read. The hard part is figuring out the tidiest and the most elegant way of expressing that. That's why in a way, writing words is like writing software. Your first draft will probably suck (as is the case here that I'll elaborate later), the same way the first iteration of a software contains a lot of bugs, code smells, and technical debts. But that's why in software engineering we do refactoring and rewrite, to get rid of all of those nasty things. When writing words, I also tend to rewrite the sentence or paragraph that I just wrote or even make a new document entirely. At least for me, there's often an itch that come up right after I wrote a sentence or a group of sentence. The itch comes in the form of a thought running through my mind that goes like this: "surely there's a better and more neat of saying this, there just is" or "this is too verbose, there must be a way to to say the same thing with less words".

The Essay Writing Process

All of that has been said also occurred when I wrote my essay. The essay went through four iterations guided by half a dozen proofreader consisting of fellow IISMA applicants or previous year's IISMA awardees. Usually, what prompted me to make a new iteration entirely is substantive feedback from any one of the proofreader, which made me want to change the core thing that I want to convey in the essay, something that can't be changed merely by accepting google docs suggestions or changing a few words.

One such substantive feedback is when I had to wrote about a deeply personal tragedy in my life. As cold as it sounds, I had to change the focus of the text there from focusing on the tragedy itself to focusing more on my rebound, the efforts that I had to put into said rebound, and the accomplishments that I still managed to reach in spite of said tragedy.

Another example that I could give is when I had to wrote about my achievements. In my first iteration, the text had what I thought as a very nice flow. Let's imagine that each of my diverse achievements are like train stations. The main idea of each of the paragraphs in the text was the train stations. The railway between them are the words contained within each paragraph. I was able to really write what I deem as a very elegant route in between all of those stations. Somehow I managed to link all those achievements together into one coherent narrative about me and what I've been trying to accomplish.

However, as much as I love what I had written, this part of the essay actually prefers depth instead of breadth. IISMA is looking for deep elaboration on one or two of your achievements: the struggle, the obstacles, and the outcome. They don't want to see a glorified bullet points of all that you've achieved. Thus, I had to scrape the text with an entirely new one. I don't know what analogy can represent it, but the two paragraphs in there stand high and firm with deep foundation, independently of each other. I didn't try to connect them in any narrative way to save on words and I think that's for the best.

Tips

The tips that I would give should be somewhat obvious, given what I've said in the previous two sections, but I'll summarize it here in addition to some tips that I have not yet mentioned:

1. Rewriting sentences, paragraphs, or even your entire essay is normal and it would lead to a much more polished and refined essay.

2. Maximize the things-conveyed-per-words-used ratio. Each and every word that you put in your essay has to matter because there's a strict word limit. Relating to tips 1, one great use of a rewrite is for you to try saying more or saying the same thing but with less words.

3. Take a step back every once in a while when writing. Sometimes, obvious flaws in your writing is only visible once you've been somewhat detached from the writing after stepping away from the essay for a while.

4. Ask people who are knowledgeable, such as but not limited to previous IISMA awardees, to proofread your essays. I'm also very open to requests to proofread your essays, you can find my socials down below.

5. Allocate as much time as possible to writing your essay. As have been said previously, writing (or at least writing something that is worth reading) is taxing on the mind and is also time-consuming, especially if you follow my previous tips #1 and #3 (which you should follow).

6. Double check your grammars and avoid any typo (obviously).

7. It's your essay, write about you and what is distinct about you. You can look up references such as previous awardees' essays, but don't get hung up on the details. Instead, use those references only for the general structure and the style of writing.

Conclusion

Writing is hard. But it's a process that is really satisfying at the end when you feel like there's nothing more that you can do or change to improve what you had wrote (although this does not necessarily mean your writing is the best that it can be, maybe you merely hit a local maxima) as is the case with the fourth and final iteration of my essay.