Essay Test

Below is an application essay written in response to the following college prompt:

 What is your favorite word and why? 

I hope all who come to this site will take a minute to read it

  

        Pander: After Reading Bishop

In that most nihilistic of Shakespeare’s plays Troilus and Cressida, Pandarus opens the door for what we would call illicit sex that then leads to as bleak an ending as anything the bard wrote: the loss of love and the death of Hector (and the end of Troy thereafter). Today, at this moment (and this too, every second of every day) Romney and Obama and Paul all pander with promises that they know are not true. And my grandfather called that black and white animal at the zoo a “pander” too.

Words are all slippery when wet, they get slapped on a deck, then get gutted, and soon cooked up fresh from the sea, that wine dark sea, that goes back again as far as Homer and Pandarus.

Some words we throw back, just junk, the way an old worn boot ruins our hooks and tangles our lines. But I think I have fought with a whopper, though nothing as big and as menacing as the dark shark from Jaws or a Shakespearean pimp.

So pick up your iPhone and click a photo with me smiling and holding it up. I caught the thing and, perhaps in the struggle, I hope I caught you too. But I promise I will never pander in class for a grade or in an activity for a leadership position. I will take my words by the gills and hold them up, proud to show off to the world what I have wrought from a single word-- the soft white meat just underneath a glistening  well-turned thought.

What do you think? Is it pretentious, or poetic, or just pitiful? I would like to conduct an experiment. I would like as many of you as possible to critique this essay. I don’t mean just a word or a sentence but something a little more substantive so the writer will have some concrete idea of why you respond as you do.

I would ask that you email me the response rather than putting them in the comments section. I know myself well enough to know that if I saw all the previous readers had a much different opinion that I did, then I would be hesitant to send my remarks in. I imagine there are at least a couple of others out there who are like this too. In other words, I want you to approach this essay without preformed conceptions. After some responses come in, I will let you all see them (anonymously-no names). I already have a few from people who I specifically asked to give some feedback;  their responses made me think of trying this form of what I would call research.

Thank you to anyone who will help me with this. I do believe the more responses I get the better the data will be.

“Without data you are just another person with an opinion”.
(Andreas Schleicher, the German scientist behind PISA -- the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment.)