College Essay Topic #4 7 Essay Tips for Writing a College Application Essay About a Fictional Character

College Essay Topic #4 7 Essay Tips for Writing a College Application Essay About a Fictional Character How can you write an essay about a character from a novel, play or movie without ending up with a book report instead of a college application essay?   Follow these guidelines and you will demonstrate your ability to think critically about literature, film or theater, as well as about yourself. 1.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Choose a character who truly inspired you, repulsed you, or otherwise moved you. Demonstrate that you know the character well.   Re-read the book or watch the movie again if you have to! 2.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Ask yourself, â€Å"How am I like this character?   How am I different? Write about it. 3.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Write about the lessons you learned from the character.   How have you applied those lessons in your life? 4.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   If the character is from the past or the future, or from a different town, country, or even planet, inquire as to how you would fare in the character’s world. 5.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Similarly to #4, how would the character fare in your world?   What if the character had to babysit your brother or do your science fair project? 6.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Share just enough information about the character and the character’s situation to allow us to understand how you are similar to or different from that character.   Keep the â€Å"story† to a minimum. 7.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Make sure the essay is at least 75% about you!   If you find yourself writing more than 25% about the character, step back, ask yourself question #s 1-5, and change the balance. Remember, just because you’re writing about a character doesn’t mean you have to re-tell the entire life story of the character.   Keep it personal and reflective and you’ll write a winning essay. For examples of successful college essays, The Essay Expert recommends Accepted!   50 Successful College Admissions Essays by Gen and Kelly Tanabe. Still not sure how to write a great college application essay about your sport?   Contact The Essay Expert for a FREE 15 minute consultation.

4 Things That Define Minerals

4 Things That Define Minerals In the field of geology, you will often hear a variety of terms including the word mineral. What are minerals, exactly? They are any substance that meets these four specific qualities: Minerals are natural: These substances that form without any human help.Minerals are solid: They dont droop or melt or evaporate.Minerals are inorganic: They arent carbon compounds like those found in living things.Minerals are crystalline: They have a distinct recipe and arrangement of atoms. Despite that, though, there are still some exceptions to these criteria. Unnatural Minerals Until the 1990s, mineralogists could propose names for chemical compounds that formed during the breakdown of artificial substances...things found in places like industrial sludge pits and rusting cars. That loophole is now closed, but there are minerals on the books that arent truly natural. Soft Minerals Traditionally and officially, native mercury is considered a mineral, even though the metal is liquid at room temperature. At about -40 C, though, it solidifies and forms crystals like other metals. So there are parts of Antarctica where mercury is unimpeachably a mineral. For a less extreme example, consider the mineral ikaite, a hydrated calcium carbonate that forms only in cold water. It degrades into calcite and water above 8 C. It is significant in the polar regions, the ocean floor, and other cold places, but you cant bring it into the lab except in a freezer. Ice is a mineral, even though it isnt listed in the mineral field guide. When ice collects in large enough bodies, it flows in its solid state thats what glaciers are. And salt (halite) behaves similarly, rising underground in broad domes and sometimes spilling out in salt glaciers. Indeed, all minerals, and the rocks they are part of, slowly deform given enough heat and pressure. Thats what makes plate tectonics possible. So in a sense, no minerals are really solid except maybe diamonds. Other minerals that arent quite solid are instead flexible. The mica minerals are the best-known example, but molybdenite is another. Its metallic flakes can be crumpled like aluminum foil. The asbestos mineral chrysotile  is stringy enough to weave into cloth. Organic Minerals The rule that minerals must be inorganic may be the strictest one. The substances that make up coal, for instance, are different kinds of hydrocarbon compounds derived from cell walls, wood, pollen, and so on. These are called macerals instead of minerals. If coal is squeezed hard enough for long enough, the carbon sheds all its other elements and becomes graphite. Even though it is of organic origin, graphite is a true mineral with carbon atoms arranged in sheets. Diamonds, similarly, are carbon atoms arranged in a rigid framework. After some four billion years of life on Earth, its safe to say that all the worlds diamonds and graphite are of organic origin even if they arent strictly speaking organic. Amorphous Minerals A few things fall short in crystallinity, hard as we try. Many minerals form crystals that are too small to see under the microscope. But even these can be shown to be crystalline at the nanoscale using the technique of X-ray powder diffraction, though, because X-rays are a super-shortwave type of light that can image extremely small things. Having a crystal form means that the substance has a chemical formula. It might be as simple as halites (NaCl) or complex like  epidotes (Ca2Al2(Fe3, Al)(SiO4)(Si2O7)O(OH)), but if you were shrunk to an atoms size, you could tell what mineral you were seeing by its molecular makeup and arrangement. A few substances fail the X-ray test. They are truly glasses or colloids, with a fully random structure at the atomic scale. They are amorphous, scientific Latin for formless. These get the honorary name mineraloid. Mineraloids are a small club of about eight members, and thats stretching things by including some organic substances (violating criterion 3 as well as 4).