A lot of what we do here is coaching around essays, and today’s post may make some of you click away, thinking it’s insignificant. But it’s not.
Everything matters in an essay, and one of the best ways to succeed in life is sweating the details.
Here are two sentences pulled from a newspaper article about an unfortunate event.
Here’s the headline: An off-duty police officer was shot in the chest. Prosecutors say it was a deadly game.
This paragraph is from the first third:
[T]he grievously wounded woman, who soon died at a hospital was a police officer, too: Katlyn Alix, a 24-year-old Army veteran with two years on the force. And St. Louis authorities soon said she was killed by a colleague.
And here’s a paragraph about halfway through:
The bizarre shooting comes at a difficult time for the department, which is already under national scrutiny after four St. Louis officers were indicted by a federal grand jury in November in the brutal beating of a 22-year police veteran who had been posing as a protester during 2017 demonstrations over a fatal police shooting.
Here are your questions:
1. How old was the officer who had been shot?
2. How long had that officer served on the police force?
3. How old was the officer who was indicted?
4. How long had that officer served on the police force?
Do you see the issue?
Anyone want to comment on this? How would you write these two sentences to fix it? Let’s talk about it!
2019Applicant says
Not sure I see any ambiguity issues here?
1. How old was the officer who had been shot?
24 years old
2. How long had that officer served on the police force?
2 years
3. How old was the officer who was indicted?
Idk. 4 officers were indicted for the beating of another officer in 2017.
4. How long had that officer served on the police force?
No idea, but the officer that was beat served for 22 years.
essaysnark says
You are absolutely correct – except that you ditched the question, and actually kinda proved our point along the way. 🙂
The issue obviously is that the phrasing of # of years is used in two separate ways within the same article. For a reader who’s moving quickly through the piece — which your adcom readers will be doing — this can cause problems in comprehension. The way we parsed isolated the two paragraphs in this post made for an artificial environment where the possibility for confusion was perhaps minimized; in reading through here, you were looking for issues in meaning, so it’s likely that your brain was engaged in a different way (analysis, rather than understanding — totally different parts of the brain work for those functions [sauce]). Regardless, hopefully you can see why we asked these questions.
Do you want to try and suggest a rewrite to fix it?
Also, three more questions for you:
1. Did you go to the link, or only read the paragraphs on this page?
2. Did you experience any confusion at all or was it crystal clear?
3. How long did you spend in analyzing it?
(You’re probably gonna say it was lickety-split patently obvious which is fine! just curious if you want to share the process you went through to answer – since clearly you took more time on it than any BSer who’s come before! And that’s appreciated!!!)
2019Applicant says
Fair, fair! I was already primed to look at the samples with a discerning eye. Agree with you that someone skimming would likely be confused by the non-parallel use of years. Any case, as a former newspaper editor myself, I appreciated this fun little exercise!
1. Did you go to the link, or only read the paragraphs on this page?
Just this page. WaPo paywalled me 😀
2. Did you experience any confusion at all or was it crystal clear?
Crystal clear, but that was probably an artifact of how the information was presented. In the wild, I could see how it’s confusing.
3. How long did you spend in analyzing it?
Probably 60-90 seconds.