Urch

In the fall (in the northern hemisphere), my students start coming to me in droves asking me what they should write about in their essays.  Like a lot of young people today, they are very worried about getting into a good school; California is facing some pretty drastic budget cuts, while people are applying to the University of California in record numbers. In a word, it’s harder today than it has ever been to gain admission to such prestigious universities as U.C. Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, and the like. But more on that in future writing.

Today, I want to talk about what to write about in  your personal statements. Read the rest of this entry →

Every fall I read a few hundred admissions essays, most of which are intended for the admissions officers of the embattled University of California. And every year I think to myself, I wish this person had attended our college admissions workshop. For TestMagic students, it’s a free seminar and most of the time is open to the public as well.

People often ask me what we cover in the workshop, and I often tell people it’s just mostly common-sense advice. For example, plan ahead, choose your schools carefully, spend time on your essays, etc. To me, perhaps because I’ve been doing this for so long, this all seems fairly self-evident, not just for admissions season, and not just for all things academic, but for life as well: Think ahead. Be earnest. Be intelligent. Put your heart into it.

I’ve compiled a good list of dos and don’ts of applying to college, many or most or all of which I will try to share here.

Here’s one of them:

Tip #217: Don’t talk about SAT prep

Read the rest of this entry →

comprehensive

Part of Speech: adj

Pronunciations: kom-pree-HEN-siv IPA: /kɒm.prɪ.ˈhɛn.sɪv/

Definition: including all or a great amount, especially as related to knowledge or learning (Ex: a comprehensive analysis).

Example: In timed essays, such as the 25-minute essay on the SAT, students aren’t expected to write comprehensive treatises on the subjects they choose; on the contrary, they are expected to come up with only a handful of good ideas and explain them.

Most common mistake: In class, when this word comes up, a LOT of students say that they think this word means understandable. It doesn’t. Be careful!

See the word in an SAT sample question: Solve this sample sentence completion question: http://www.urch.com/forums/sat/119954-sentence-completion-anna-maria-asserted-she-learned-little.html.

Here’s a common exchange in class at TestMagic:

• Ray, do you know what ironic means?
• ironic? No… But I’ve heard of it.

I’ll confess that the first few times I heard this usage, I imagined a group of people standing around discussing the word ironic: “Hey, Jessie, how about that new word today in class?” “Yeah, that was pretty unexpected. Like when the teacher wrote it up on the board, it looked like iron. I TOTALLY thought the teacher was going to write iron. But then right when the teacher should’ve stopped, he just kept going!” “Yeah! With an i and a c!” “Yeah, that was hecka tight!” “By the way, did you get the definition?” “Definition?? No, I was too busy trying to make anagrams with it.” “Cool word, though, huh?” “Yeah, cool word. It’ll be cool to use it in speech one day.”

Sort of an absurd conversation, right? Well, absurd if you know that the participants are discussing a word. It sounds like they’re discussing… a person, right? Right.

So, here’s the rule: Read the rest of this entry →

Raise your SAT score: What’s a dictum?

Part of Speech: noun

Pronunciations: DIK-tum IPA: /’dɪk.təm/

Definition: an authoritative declaration, statement, or saying (Ex: Google’s dictum “don’t be evil”).

Example sentence: The dictum popularly credited to P.T. Barnum that “there’s a sucker born every minute” has been used to explain the great success of ineffectual weight-loss products.

Examples of dicta:

• There’s a popular dictum among Texans that you can take the boy out of Texas, but you can’t take the Texas out of the boy.
• It is life’s dictum that we will all sooner or later meet with the same fate.
• My mother lent me the car with the dictum that I treat it as a loaded weapon.
  

Discussion: The plural form of dictum in English can be either dicta (the original Latin form) or dictums, the regularized form. A quick check of the American Corpus of Contemporary American English shows 81 occurrences of dicta and only 25 occurrences of dictums.

SAT vocab: What does “ferret” mean?

Definition: The noun: A type of domesticated mammal that looks like a weasel and is often bred to hunt small game. The verb: To find after searching (Ex: to ferret out a criminal).

Part of Speech: noun & verb

Pronunciations: FARE-it
or, if you prefer the IPA: /ˈfɛɪr.ɪt/

Example: Our Health Ed teacher challenged us to go to any corporate supermarket to ferret out packaged goods that were both healthy and inexpensive (for example, a product with more milligrams of salt than number of calories would be disqualified); this was a challenge more difficult than we had expected.

This is a list of the important words to know for  H. G. Wells’ The Country of the Blind. There are some proper nouns in here, which I will try to remove later. But for now, this is the list of most of the words that many English-speaking students (middle-school and high-school students, for example) should know.

Please note that this is the output of the software that we use; some words may not be English words.

1. abundant
2. acute
3. adoration
4. advent
5. affliction
6. agglomeration
7. aimlessly
8. akin
9. aloof
10. alp
11. amber
12. ancestor
13. antagonist
14. antidote
15. appointed
16. apprehensively
17. arch
18. armour
19. artifice
20. aspect
21. assent
22. assert Read the rest of this entry →