annoying experience essay

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158 Annoying Ways People Use Sources by Kyle D. Stedman

How slow driving is like sloppy writing.

I hate slow drivers. When I’m driving in the fast lane, maintaining the speed limit exactly, and I find myself behind someone who thinks the fast lane is for people who drive ten miles per hour below the speed limit, I get an annoyed feeling in my chest like hot water filling a heavy bucket. I wave my arms around and yell, “What . . . ? But, hey . . . oh come on! ” There are at least two explanations for why some slow drivers fail to move out of the way:

1.       They don’t know that the generally accepted practice of highway driving in the U.S. is to move to the right if an upcoming car wants to pass. Or,

2.       They know the guidelines but don’t care.

But here’s the thing: writers can forget that their readers are sometimes just as annoyed at writing that fails to follow conventions as drivers are when stuck behind a car that fails to move over. In other words, there’s something similar between these two people: the knowledgeable driver who thinks, “I thought all drivers knew that the left lane is for the fastest cars,” and the reader who thinks, “I thought all writers knew that outside sources should be introduced, punctuated, and cited according to a set of standards.”

One day, you may discover that something you’ve written has just been read by a reader who, unfortunately, was annoyed at some of the ways you integrated sources. She was reading along and then suddenly exclaimed, “What . . . ? But, hey . . . oh come on! ” If you’re lucky, this reader will try to imagine why you typed things the way you did, giving you the benefit of the doubt. But sometimes you’ll be slotted into positions that might not really be accurate. When this frustrated reader walks away from your work, trying to figure out, say, why you used so many quotations, or why you kept starting and ending paragraphs with them, she may come to the same conclusions I do about slow drivers:

1.       You don’t know the generally accepted practices of using sources (especially in academic writing) in the U.S. Or,

2.       You know the guidelines but don’t care.

And it will be a lot harder for readers to take you seriously if they think you’re ignorant or rude.

This judgment, of course, will often be unfair. These readers might completely ignore the merits of your insightful, stylistically beautiful, or revolutionarily important language—just as my anger at another driver makes me fail to admire his custom paint job. But readers and writers don’t always see eye to eye on the same text. In fact, some things I write about in this essay will only bother your pickiest readers (some teachers, some editors, some snobby friends), while many other readers might zoom past how you use sources without blinking. But in my experience, I find that teachers do a disservice when we fail to alert students to the kind of things that some readers might be annoyed at—however illogical these things sometimes seem. People are often unreasonably picky, and writers have to deal with that—which they do by trying to anticipate and preemptively fix whatever might annoy a broad range of readers. Plus, the more effectively you anticipate that pickiness, the more likely it is that readers will interpret your quotations and paraphrases in the way you want them to—critically or acceptingly, depending on your writing context.

It helps me to remember that the conventions of writing have a fundamentally rhetorical nature. That is, I follow different conventions depending on the purpose and audience of my writing, because I know that I’ll come across differently to different people depending on how well I follow the conventions expected in any particular writing space. In a blog, I cite a source by hyperlinking; in an academic essay, I use a parenthetical citation that refers to a list of references at the end of the essay. One of the fundamental ideas of rhetoric is that speakers/writers/composers shape what they say/write/create based on what they want it to do, where they’re publishing it, and what they know about their audience/readers. And those decisions include nitty-gritty things like introducing quotations and citing paraphrases clearly: not everyone in the entire world approaches these things the same way, but when I strategically learn the expectations of my U.S. academic audience, what I really want to say comes across smoothly, without little annoying blips in my readers’ experience. Notice that I’m not saying that there’s a particular right or wrong way to use conventions in my writing—if the modern U.S. academic system had evolved from a primarily African or Asian or Latin American cultural consciousness instead of a European one, conventions for writing would probably be very different. That’s why they’re conventions and not rules.

The Annoyances

Because I’m not here to tell you rules, decrees, or laws, it makes sense to call my classifications annoyances. In the examples that follow, I wrote all of the annoying examples myself, but all the examples I use of good writing come from actual student papers in first-year composition classes at my university; I have their permission to quote them.

Armadillo Roadkill

Everyone in the car hears it: buh-BUMP. dropping in a quotation The driver insists to the passengers, “But without introducing it that armadillo—I didn’t see it! It just came first out of nowhere!”

Sadly, a poorly introduced quotation can lead readers to a similar exclamation: “It just came out of nowhere!” And though readers probably won’t experience the same level of grief and regret when surprised by a quotation as opposed to an armadillo, I submit that there’s a kinship between the experiences: both involve a normal, pleasant activity (driving; reading) stopped suddenly short by an unexpected barrier (a sudden armadillo; a sudden quotation). Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

We should all be prepared with a backup plan if a zombie invasion occurs. “Unlike its human counterparts, an army of zombies is completely independent of support” (Brooks 155). Preparations should be made in the following areas. . . .

Did you notice how the quotation is dropped in without any kind of warning? (Buh-BUMP.)

The Fix: The easiest way to effectively massage in quotations is by purposefully returning to each one in your draft to see if you set the stage for your readers—often, by signaling that a quote is about to come, stating who the quote came from, and showing how your readers should interpret it. In the above example, that could be done by introducing the quotation with something like this (new text bolded):

We should all be prepared with a backup plan if a zombie invasion occurs. Max Brooks suggests a number of ways to prepare for zombies’ particular traits, though he underestimates the ability of humans to survive in harsh environments. For example, he writes, “Unlike its human counterparts, an army of zombies is completely independent of support” (155). His shortsightedness could have a number of consequences. . . .

In this version, I know a quotation is coming (“For example”), I know it’s going to be written by Max Brooks, and I know I’m being asked to read the quote rather skeptically (“he underestimates”). The sentence with the quotation itself also now begins with a “tag” that eases us into it (“he writes”).

Here’s an actual example from Alexsandra. Notice the way she builds up to the quotation and then explains it:

In the first two paragraphs, the author takes a defensive position when explaining the perception that the public has about scientists by saying that “there is anxiety that scientists lack both wisdom and social responsibility and are so motivated by ambition . . .” and “scientists are repeatedly referred to as ‘playing God’” (Wolpert 345). With this last sentence especially, his tone seems to demonstrate how he uses the ethos appeal to initially set a tone of someone that is tired of being misunderstood.

Alexsandra prepares us for the quotation, quotes, and then analyzes it. I love it. This isn’t a hard and fast rule—I’ve seen it broken by the best of writers, I admit—but it’s a wise standard to hold yourself to unless you have a reason not to.

Dating Spider-Man

An annoyance that’s closely connected to Dating Spider-Man: Armadillo Roadkill is the tendency writers sometimes have of starting or ending paragraphs with quotations. This isn’t technically wrong, and there are situations when the effect of surprise is what you’re going for. But often, a paragraph-beginning or paragraph-closing quotation feels rushed, unexplained, disjointed.

It’s like dating Spider-Man. You’re walking along with him and he says something remarkably interesting—but then he tilts his head, hearing something far away, and suddenly shoots a web onto the nearest building and zooms away through the air. As if you had just read an interesting quotation dangling at the end of a paragraph, you wanted to hear more of his opinion, but it’s too late—he’s already moved on. Later, he suddenly jumps off a balcony and is by your side again, and he starts talking about something you don’t understand. You’re confused because he just dropped in and expected you to understand the context of what was on his mind at that moment, much like when readers step into a paragraph that begins with a quotation. Here’s an example:

[End of a preceding paragraph:] . . . Therefore, the evidence clearly suggests that we should be exceptionally careful about deciding when and where to rest. “When taking a nap, always rest your elbow on your desk and keep your arm perpendicular to your desktop” (Piven and Borgenicht 98). After all, consider the following scenario. . . .

There’s a perfectly good reason why this feels odd—which should feel familiar after reading about the Armadillo Roadkill annoyance above. When you got to the quotation in the second paragraph, you didn’t know what you were supposed to think about it; there was no guidance.

The Fix is the same: in the majority of situations, readers appreciate being guided to and led away from a quotation by the writer doing the quoting. Readers get a sense of pleasure from the safe flow of hearing how to read an upcoming quotation, reading it, and then being told one way to interpret it. Prepare, quote, analyze.

I mentioned above that there can be situations where starting a paragraph with a quotation can have a strong effect. Personally, I usually enjoy this most at the beginning of essays or the beginning of sections—like in this example from the very beginning of Jennifer’s essay:

“Nothing is ever simple: Racism and nobility can exist in the same man, hate and love in the same woman, fear and loyalty, compromise and idealism, all the yin-yang dichotomies that make the human species so utterly confounding, yet so utterly fascinating” (Hunter). The hypocrisy and complexity that Stephen Hunter from the Washington Post describes is the basis of the movie Crash (2004).

Instantly, her quotation hooks me. It doesn’t feel thoughtless, like it would feel if I continued to be whisked to quotations without preparation throughout the essay. But please don’t overdo it; any quotation that opens an essay or section ought to be integrally related to your topic (as is Jennifer’s), not just a cheap gimmick.

Uncle Barry and His Encyclopedia of Use less Information

You probably know someone like this person (for me, my Uncle Barry) who constantly tries to impress me with how much he knows about just about everything. I might casually bring up something in the news (“Wow, these health care debates are getting really heated, aren’t they?”) and then find myself barraged by all of Uncle Barry’s ideas on government-sponsored health care—which then drifts into a story about how his cousin Maxine died in an underfunded hospice center, which had a parking lot that he could have designed better, which reminds him of how good he is at fixing things, just like the garage door at my parents’ house, which probably only needs a little. . . . You get the idea. I might even think to myself, “Wait, I want to know more about that topic, but you’re zooming on before you contextualize your information at all.”

This is something like reading an essay that relies too much on quotations. Readers get the feeling that they’re moving from one quotation to the next without ever quite getting to hear the real point of what the author wants to say, never getting any time to form an opinion about the claims. In fact, this often makes it sound as if the author has almost no authority at all. You may have been annoyed by paragraphs like this before:

Addressing this issue, David M. Potter comments, “Whether Seward meant this literally or not, it was in fact a singularly accurate forecast for territorial Kansas” (199). Of course, Potter’s view is contested, even though he claims, “Soon, the Missourians began to perceive the advantages of operating without publicity” (200). Interestingly, “The election was bound to be irregular in any case” (201).

Wait—huh? This author feels like Uncle Barry to me: grabbing right and left for topics (or quotes) in an effort to sound authoritative.

The Fix is to return to each quotation and decide why it’s there and then massage it in accordingly. If you just want to use a quote to cite a fact, then consider paraphrasing or summarizing the source material (which I find is usually harder than it sounds but is usually worth it for the smoothness my paragraph gains). But if you quoted because you want to draw attention to the source’s particular phrasing, or if you want to respond to something you agree with or disagree with in the source, then consider taking the time to surround each quotation with guidance to your readers about what you want them to think about that quote.

In the following passage, I think Jessica demonstrates a balance between source and analysis well. Notice that she only uses a single quotation, even though she surely could have chosen more. But instead, Jessica relies on her instincts and remains the primary voice of authority in the passage:

Robin Toner’s article, “Feminist Pitch by a Democrat named Obama,” was written a week after the video became public and is partially a response to it. She writes, “The Obama campaign is, in some ways, subtly marketing its candidate as a post-feminist man, a generation beyond the gender conflicts of the boomers.” Subtly is the key word. Obama is a passive character throughout the video, never directly addressing the camera. Rather, he is shown indirectly through speeches, intimate conversations with supporters and candid interaction with family. This creates a sense of intimacy, which in turn creates a feeling of trust.

Toner’s response to the Obama video is like a diving board that Jessica bounces off of before she gets to the really interesting stuff: the pool (her own observations). A bunch of diving boards lined up without a pool (tons of quotes with no analysis) wouldn’t please anyone—except maybe Uncle Barry.

Am I in the Right Movie?

When reading drafts of my writing, this is a common experience: I start to read a sentence that seems interesting and normal, with everything going just the way I expect it to. But then the unexpected happens: a quotation blurts itself into the sentence in a way that doesn’t fit with the grammar that built up to quotation. It feels like sitting in a movie theater, everything going as expected, when suddenly the opening credits start for a movie I didn’t plan to see. Here are two examples of what I’m talking about. Read them out loud, and you’ll see how suddenly wrong they feel.

1.       Therefore, the author warns that a zombie’s vision “are no different than those of a normal human” (Brooks 6).

2.       Sheila Anne Barry advises that “Have you ever wondered what it’s like to walk on a tightrope—many feet up in the air?” (50)

In the first example, the quoter’s build-up to the quotation uses a singular subject— a zombie’s vision —which, when paired with the quotation, is annoyingly matched with the plural verb are. It would be much less jolting to write, “a zombie’s vision is, ” which makes the subject and verb agree. In the second example, the quoter builds up to the quotation with a third-person, declarative independent clause: Sheila Anne Barry advises. But then the quotation switches into second person— you —and unexpectedly asks a question—completely different from the expectation that was built up by the first part of the sentence.

The Fix is usually easy: you read your essay out loud to someone else, and if you stumble as you enter a quotation, there’s probably something you can adjust in your lead-in sentence to make the two fit together well. Maybe you’ll need to choose a different subject to make it fit with the quote’s verb ( reader instead of readers; each instead of all ), or maybe you’ll have to scrap what you first wrote and start over. On occasion you’ll even feel the need to transparently modify the quotation by adding an [s] to one of its verbs, always being certain to use square brackets to show that you adjusted something in the quotation. Maybe you’ll even find a way to quote a shorter part of the quotation and squeeze it into the context of a sentence that is mostly your own, a trick that can have a positive effect on readers, who like smooth water slides more than they like bumpy slip-and-slides. Jennifer does this well in the following sentence, for example:

In Crash, no character was allowed to “escape his own hypocrisy” (Muller), and the film itself emphasized that the reason there is so much racial tension among strangers is because of the personal issues one cannot deal with alone.

She saw a phrase that she liked in Muller’s article, so she found a way to work it in smoothly, without the need for a major break in her thought. Let’s put ourselves in Jennifer’s shoes for a moment: it’s possible that she started drafting this sentence using the plural subject characters, writing “In Crash, no characters were allowed. . . .” But then, imagine she looked back at the quote from Muller and saw that it said “escape his own hypocrisy,” which was a clue that she had to change the first part of her sentence to match the singular construction of the quote.

I Can’t Find the Stupid Link

You’ve been in this situation: you’re on   a website that seems like it might be interesting and you want to learn more about it. But the home page doesn’t tell you much, so you look for an “About Us” or “More Information” or “FAQ” link. But no matter where you search—Top of page? Bottom? Left menu?—you can’t find the stupid link. This is usually the fault of web designers, who don’t always take the time to test their sites as much as they should with actual users.

The communication failure here is simple: you’re used to finding certain kinds of basic information in the places people usually put it. If it’s not there, you’re annoyed.

Similarly, a reader might see a citation and have a quick internal question about it: What journal was this published in? When was it published? Is this an article I could find online to skim myself? This author has a sexy last name—I wonder what his first name is? Just like when you look for a link to more information, this reader has a simple, quick question that he or she expects to answer easily. And the most basic way for readers to answer those questions (when they’re reading a work written in APA or MLA style) is (1) to look at the information in the citation, and (2) skim the references or works cited section alphabetically, looking for the first letter in the citation. There’s an assumption that the first letter of a citation will be the letter to look for in the list of works cited.

In short, the following may annoy readers who want to quickly learn more about the citation:

[Essay Text:] A respected guide on the subject suggests, “If possible, always take the high ground and hold it” ( The Zombie Survival Guide 135). [Works Cited Page:] Brooks, Max. The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead. New York: Three Rivers, 2003. Print.

The reader may wonder when The Zombie Survival Guide was published and flip back to the works cited page, but the parenthetical citation sends her straight to the Z ’s in the works cited list (because initial A ’s and The ’s are ignored when alphabetizing). However, the complete works cited entry is actually with the B ’s (where it belongs).

The Fix is to make sure that the first word of the works cited entry is the word you use in your in-text citation, every time. If the works cited entry starts with Brooks, use (Brooks) in the essay text.

Citations not including last names may seem to complicate this advice, but they all follow the same basic concept. For instance, you might have:

• A citation that only lists a title. For instance, your citation might read (“Gray Wolf General Information”). In this case, the assumption is that the citation can be found under the G section of the works cited page. Leah cites her paraphrase of a source with no author in the following way, indicating that I should head to the G ’s if I want to learn more about her source:

Alaska is the only refuge that is left for the wolves in the United States, and once that is gone, they will more than likely become extinct in this country (“Gray Wolf General Information”).

• A citation that only lists a page number. Maybe the citation simply says (25). That implies that somewhere in the surrounding text, the essay writer must have made it stupendously clear what name or title to look up in the works cited list. This happens a lot, since it’s common to introduce a quotation by naming the person it came from, in which case it would be repetitive to name that author again in the citation.
• A quotation without a citation at all. This happens when you cite a work that is both A) from a web page that doesn’t number the pages or paragraphs and B) is named in the text surrounding the quotation. Readers will assume that the author is named nearby. Stephanie wisely leaves off any citation in the example below, where it’s already clear that I should head to the O ’s on the works cited page to find information about this source, a web page written by Opotow:

To further this point, Opotow notes, “Don’t imagine you’ll be unscathed by the methods you use. The end may justify the means. . . . But there’s a price to pay, and the price does tend to be oneself.”

I Swear I Did Some Research!

Let’s look in depth at this potentially annoying passage from a hypothetical student paper:

It’s possible that a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the universe will open new doors of un derstanding. If theories from sociology, communication, and philosophy joined with physics, the possibilities would be boundless. This would inspire new research, much like in the 1970s when scientists changed their focus from grand-scale theories of the universe to the small concerns of quantum physics (Hawking 51).

In at least two ways, this is stellar material. First, the author is actually voicing a point of view; she sounds knowledgeable, strong. Second, and more to the point of this chapter, the author includes a citation, showing that she knows that ethical citation standards ask authors to cite paraphrases and summaries—not just quotations.

But on the other hand, which of these three sentences, exactly, came from Hawking’s book? Did Hawking claim that physics experts should join up with folks in other academic disciplines, or is that the student writer? In other words, at which point does the author’s point of view meld into material taken specifically from Hawking?

I recognize that there often aren’t clean answers to a question like that. What we read and what we know sometimes meld together so unnoticeably that we don’t know which ideas and pieces of information are “ours” and which aren’t. Discussing “patchwriting,” a term used to describe writing that blends words and phrases from sources with words and phrases we came up with ourselves, scholar Rebecca Moore Howard writes, “When I believe I am not patchwriting, I am simply doing it so expertly that the seams are no longer visible—or I am doing it so unwittingly that I cannot cite my sources” (91). In other words, all the moves we make when writing came from somewhere else at some point, whether we realize it or not. Yikes. But remember our main purpose here: to not look annoying when using sources. And most of your instructors aren’t going to say, “I understand that I couldn’t tell the difference between your ideas and your source’s because we quite naturally patchwrite all the time. That’s fine with me. Party on!” They’re much more likely to imagine that you plopped in a few extra citations as a way of defensively saying, “I swear I did some research! See? Here’s a citation right here! Doesn’t that prove I worked really hard?”

The Fix : Write the sentences preceding the citation with specific words and phrases that will tell readers what information came from where. Like this (bolded words are new):

It’s possible that a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the universe will open new doors of understanding. I believe that if theories from sociology, communication, and philosophy joined with physics, the possibilities would be boundless. This would inspire new research, much like the changes Stephen Hawking describes happening in the 1970s when scientists changed their focus from grand-scale theories of the universe to the small concerns of quantum physics (51).

Perhaps these additions could still use some stylistic editing for wordiness and flow, but the source-related job is done: readers know exactly which claims the essay writer is making and which ones Hawking made in his book. The last sentence and only the last sentence summarizes the ideas Hawking describes on page 51 of his book.

One warning: you’ll find that scholars in some disciplines (especially in the sciences and social sciences) use citations in the way I just warned you to avoid. You might see sentences like this one, from page 64 of Glenn Gordon Smith, Ana T. Torres-Ayala, and Allen J. Heindel’s article in the Journal of Distance Education:

Some researchers have suggested “curriculum” as a key element in the design of web-based courses (Berge, 1998; Driscoll, 1998; Meyen, Tangen, & Lian, 1999; Wiens & Gunter, 1998).

Whoa—that’s a lot of citations. Remember how the writer of my earlier example cited Stephen Hawking because she summarized his ideas? Well, a number of essays describing the results of experiments, like this one, use citations with a different purpose, citing previous studies whose general conclusions support the study described in this new paper, like building blocks. It’s like saying to your potentially skeptical readers, “Look, you might be wondering if I’m a quack. But I can prove I’m not! See, all these other people published in similar areas! Are you going to pick fights with all of them too?” You might have noticed as well that these citations are in APA format, reflecting the standards of the social sciences journal this passage was published in. Well, in this kind of context APA’s requirement to cite the year of a study makes a lot of sense too—after all, the older a study, the less likely it is to still be relevant.

Conclusion: Use Your Turn Signals

You may have guessed the biggest weakness in an essay like this: what’s annoying varies from person to person, with some readers happily skimming past awkward introductions to quotations without a blink, while others see a paragraph-opening quotation as something to complain about on Facebook. All I’ve given you here—all I can give you unless I actually get to know you and your various writing contexts—are the basics that will apply in a number of academic writing contexts. Think of these as signals to your readers about your intentions, much as wise drivers rely on their turn signals to communicate their intentions to other drivers. In some cases when driving, signaling is an almost artistic decision, relying on the gut reaction of the driver to interpret what is best in times when the law doesn’t mandate use one way or the other. I hope your writing is full of similar signals. Now if I could only convince the guy driving in front of me to use his blinker. . . .

• Because so many of these guidelines depend on the writer’s purpose, publication space, and audience, it can be difficult to know when to follow them strictly and when to bend them. What are some specific writing situations where a writer is justified to bend the standards of how to incorporate sources?
• Choose one of the annoyances. Then, look through a number of different pieces of writing from different genres and collect two examples of writers who followed your chosen guideline perfectly and two who didn’t. For each source you found, jot a sentence or two describing the context of that source and why you think its writer did or did not follow the guideline.
• Rank the annoyances in order of most annoying to least annoying, pretending that you are a college professor. Now, rank them from the point of view of a newspaper editor, a popular blogger, and another college student. What changes did you make in your rankings?

Works Cited

Barry, Sheila Anne. Tricks & Pranks to Fool Your Friends. New York: Sterling, 1984. Print.

Brooks, Max. The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead. New York: Three Rivers, 2003. Print.

“Gray Wolf General Information.” Environmental Conservation Online System. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 15 Oct. 2008. Web. 23 Oct. 2008.

Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. New York: Bantam, 1988. Print.

Howard, Rebecca Moore. “The New Abolitionism Comes to Plagiarism.” Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Ed. Lisa Buranen and Alice M. Roy. Albany: SUNY P, 1999. 87–95. Print.

Hunter, Stephen. “‘Crash’: The Collision Of Human Contradictions.” The Washington Post. The Washington Post Company, 6 May 2005. Web. 21 Feb. 2008.

Muller, Bill. “Crash: LA Tale Confronts, Then Shatters, Stereotypes.” The Arizona Republic. AZCentral.com, 6 May 2005. Web. 21 Feb. 2008.

Opotow, Susan. “Moral Exclusion and Torture: The Ticking Bomb Scenario and the Slippery Ethical Slope.” Peace and Conflict Studies 13.4 (2007): 457–61. PsycINFO. Web. 27 Sept. 2008.

Piven, Joshua, and David Borgenicht. The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Work. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2003. Print.

Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis: 1848–1861. Ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Print.

Smith, Glenn Gordon, Ana T. Torres-Ayala, and Allen J. Heindel. “Disciplinary Differences in E-learning Instructional Design: The Case of Mathematics.” Journal of Distance Education 22.3 (2008): 63–88. Web. 10 Sept. 2009.

Toner, Robin. “Feminist Pitch by a Democrat Named Obama.” The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 2 Dec. 2007. Web. 22 Oct. 2008.

Wolpert, Lewis. “Is Cell Science Dangerous?” Journal of Medical Ethics 33.6 (2007): 345–48. Academic Search Premier. Web. 28 Jan. 2009.

About the Author

Kyle D. Stedman , a doctoral candidate at the University of South Florida, teaches composition and professional writing and works as technology coordinator for the first year composition program. His dissertation is on music composition and the rhetoric of sound. In 2010, he won the Conference on College Composition and Communication Chairs’ Memorial Scholarship.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons AttributionNoncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License and is subject to the Writing Spaces’ Terms of Use. To view a copy of this license, visit http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. To view the Writing Spaces’ Terms of Use, visit http://writingspaces. org/terms-of-use.

Write What Matters Copyright © 2020 by Liza Long; Amy Minervini; and Joel Gladd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Tips for Writing an Effective Application Essay

How to Write an Effective Essay

Writing an essay for college admission gives you a chance to use your authentic voice and show your personality. It's an excellent opportunity to personalize your application beyond your academic credentials, and a well-written essay can have a positive influence come decision time.

Want to know how to draft an essay for your college application ? Here are some tips to keep in mind when writing.

Tips for Essay Writing

A typical college application essay, also known as a personal statement, is 400-600 words. Although that may seem short, writing about yourself can be challenging. It's not something you want to rush or put off at the last moment. Think of it as a critical piece of the application process. Follow these tips to write an impactful essay that can work in your favor.

1. Start Early.

Few people write well under pressure. Try to complete your first draft a few weeks before you have to turn it in. Many advisers recommend starting as early as the summer before your senior year in high school. That way, you have ample time to think about the prompt and craft the best personal statement possible.

You don't have to work on your essay every day, but you'll want to give yourself time to revise and edit. You may discover that you want to change your topic or think of a better way to frame it. Either way, the sooner you start, the better.

2. Understand the Prompt and Instructions.

Before you begin the writing process, take time to understand what the college wants from you. The worst thing you can do is skim through the instructions and submit a piece that doesn't even fit the bare minimum requirements or address the essay topic. Look at the prompt, consider the required word count, and note any unique details each school wants.

3. Create a Strong Opener.

Students seeking help for their application essays often have trouble getting things started. It's a challenging writing process. Finding the right words to start can be the hardest part.

Spending more time working on your opener is always a good idea. The opening sentence sets the stage for the rest of your piece. The introductory paragraph is what piques the interest of the reader, and it can immediately set your essay apart from the others.

4. Stay on Topic.

One of the most important things to remember is to keep to the essay topic. If you're applying to 10 or more colleges, it's easy to veer off course with so many application essays.

A common mistake many students make is trying to fit previously written essays into the mold of another college's requirements. This seems like a time-saving way to avoid writing new pieces entirely, but it often backfires. The result is usually a final piece that's generic, unfocused, or confusing. Always write a new essay for every application, no matter how long it takes.

5. Think About Your Response.

Don't try to guess what the admissions officials want to read. Your essay will be easier to write─and more exciting to read─if you’re genuinely enthusiastic about your subject. Here’s an example: If all your friends are writing application essays about covid-19, it may be a good idea to avoid that topic, unless during the pandemic you had a vivid, life-changing experience you're burning to share. Whatever topic you choose, avoid canned responses. Be creative.

6. Focus on You.

Essay prompts typically give you plenty of latitude, but panel members expect you to focus on a subject that is personal (although not overly intimate) and particular to you. Admissions counselors say the best essays help them learn something about the candidate that they would never know from reading the rest of the application.

7. Stay True to Your Voice.

Use your usual vocabulary. Avoid fancy language you wouldn't use in real life. Imagine yourself reading this essay aloud to a classroom full of people who have never met you. Keep a confident tone. Be wary of words and phrases that undercut that tone.

8. Be Specific and Factual.

Capitalize on real-life experiences. Your essay may give you the time and space to explain why a particular achievement meant so much to you. But resist the urge to exaggerate and embellish. Admissions counselors read thousands of essays each year. They can easily spot a fake.

9. Edit and Proofread.

When you finish the final draft, run it through the spell checker on your computer. Then don’t read your essay for a few days. You'll be more apt to spot typos and awkward grammar when you reread it. After that, ask a teacher, parent, or college student (preferably an English or communications major) to give it a quick read. While you're at it, double-check your word count.

Writing essays for college admission can be daunting, but it doesn't have to be. A well-crafted essay could be the deciding factor─in your favor. Keep these tips in mind, and you'll have no problem creating memorable pieces for every application.

What is the format of a college application essay?

Generally, essays for college admission follow a simple format that includes an opening paragraph, a lengthier body section, and a closing paragraph. You don't need to include a title, which will only take up extra space. Keep in mind that the exact format can vary from one college application to the next. Read the instructions and prompt for more guidance.

Most online applications will include a text box for your essay. If you're attaching it as a document, however, be sure to use a standard, 12-point font and use 1.5-spaced or double-spaced lines, unless the application specifies different font and spacing.

How do you start an essay?

The goal here is to use an attention grabber. Think of it as a way to reel the reader in and interest an admissions officer in what you have to say. There's no trick on how to start a college application essay. The best way you can approach this task is to flex your creative muscles and think outside the box.

You can start with openers such as relevant quotes, exciting anecdotes, or questions. Either way, the first sentence should be unique and intrigue the reader.

What should an essay include?

Every application essay you write should include details about yourself and past experiences. It's another opportunity to make yourself look like a fantastic applicant. Leverage your experiences. Tell a riveting story that fulfills the prompt.

What shouldn’t be included in an essay?

When writing a college application essay, it's usually best to avoid overly personal details and controversial topics. Although these topics might make for an intriguing essay, they can be tricky to express well. If you’re unsure if a topic is appropriate for your essay, check with your school counselor. An essay for college admission shouldn't include a list of achievements or academic accolades either. Your essay isn’t meant to be a rehashing of information the admissions panel can find elsewhere in your application.

How can you make your essay personal and interesting?

The best way to make your essay interesting is to write about something genuinely important to you. That could be an experience that changed your life or a valuable lesson that had an enormous impact on you. Whatever the case, speak from the heart, and be honest.

Is it OK to discuss mental health in an essay?

Mental health struggles can create challenges you must overcome during your education and could be an opportunity for you to show how you’ve handled challenges and overcome obstacles. If you’re considering writing your essay for college admission on this topic, consider talking to your school counselor or with an English teacher on how to frame the essay.

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As a Captive, I Learned that Violence Is What Terrorists Use for Music

I was held prisoner in Syria for two years by a group that included both Al Qaeda and ISIS, though one of the things I learned in my captivity was that there's no real difference between them. Another thing I learned was the purpose of the violence the jihad inflicts on those who live within it. You’re supposed to withdraw yourself from earthly time right now. You’re supposed to live every moment of your life as if the ancient dream—the caliphate, the invulnerability, God’s ongoing, bloody revenge against the infidels—is coming true this instant. Will you sit idly by? If you have the courage and the physical capacity, you are meant to act.

In my view, the outside world must learn what this dream looks like and sounds like. Though the dreamers are all around us, their dreams are as uninterpretable as hieroglyphs. We glimpse them only after it’s too late —on the day after October 7 th , for instance, and now, as we wonder over the lifepaths of the Moscow attackers .

In the early days of the Syrian civil war, when ISIS and al Qaeda still belonged to one big quarrelsome family , there were times when several squads of investigators, to borrow the Syrian euphemism for torturers, would interrogate multiple prisoners in a single room. The din on these occasions was much too overwhelming for anything like an inquiry to occur. I know about everyday practices in those interrogation rooms because in October of 2012, the Syrian al Qaeda faction accused me of spying for the CIA, then locked me into a cell in the basement of what had once been, before the war, the Aleppo eye hospital. In fact, my purpose in coming to Syria had been to write essays about the war’s music, photographers, and artists—and thus to make myself into this conflict’s go-to cultural correspondent. But no matter how I pleaded—and I was desperate for my life—I couldn’t make a single member of this sprawling terrorist family believe a word I said.

One night, after a squad of fighters had inflicted one of their investigations on me, I found myself lying face down at the feet of the hospital’s chief investigator. It was some time in early winter of 2013. I wore a bloody pair of hospital pants. The cement floor was the temperature of a sidewalk, back home, in winter.  My hands were cuffed behind my back. Perhaps I had lost consciousness at some point during the proceedings? I’m not sure. Anyway, I remember that it occurred to me, quite suddenly, that a second victim was being interrogated only feet from me. Evidently, this person was hanging by his wrists from a pipe beneath the ceiling. It occurred to me that this person’s feet were bicycling through the air, and that instead of engaging his interrogators, who were shouting at him at the tops of their lungs, he screamed upward, into the ceiling. There is no God but Go, he called out, over and over. I remember that the power in this person’s voice struck me as unnatural.  He seemed to scream as if all that remained to him on earth was his voice, as if it were a rope by which he meant to lash himself to the world of the living. 

In the midst of this cacophony, the chief investigator knelt down, then pushed his face into mine. He grinned. “Do you hear what that man is saying?” he shouted to me in his idiotic way. “Do you know these words?”  Of course, I did know them. They were inscribed on every black flag. They were in the air, over and over, at every prayer. How could I not?

“Good,” said the interrogator, screaming at me though his face was practically touching mine. “This noise you are hearing. This is our music.”

Read More: Islamist Terrorism Is Not Done With Us, Warns Former al Qaeda Hostage Theo Padnos

Over the following days lying alone on the floor of my cell, I contemplated this remark. Having known the interrogator for about three months by this point, I felt I had a handle on his character. He was an impish, boastful brute. Also, a bit of a showman. He loved to swish about the interrogation room in his black velvet cape, to speechify, and to promise me that one day, when the spirit moved him, as it surely would, he himself would kill me. For him, the interrogations were quite obviously performances. He often invited little crowds of fellow fighters to observe from the shadows. Now he ordered his squad of underlings to inflict pain, now he ordered them to hold off. Often, he shrieked at them. All of these underlings were Aleppo teenagers. Every once in a while, he commanded, by means of a glance, a teenager to stir his beloved maté tea.

In those days, before I had any inkling of how a terrorist organization functions, I assumed that because this man only presided over a ring of teenagers, and because I remained alive despite his threats, he was a mere flunky in the al Qaeda hierarchy.  

Over time, however, I came to understand what real power in the jihad is. It is derived from the obvious sources, to be sure—cold bloodedness, access to ready cash, fluent command of the sacred literature. But it also comes from the ability to entrance audiences. The natural born leaders conjure fantasies to life in an instant, then hold people and places under their spell indefinitely. This particular commander , who called himself Kawa, after a mythical Kurdish warrior, was poor. He rode around on a humble Chinese motorcycle, as no actual authority in the jihad would do. Yet he certainly had a knack for summoning an Islamic fantasy to life—for him it was a caliphate—with a few softly uttered phrases. Over the minds of the many teenagers who hung around in the eye hospital basement, he certainly exercised sovereign control.

Down there, over time, I learned that music really does help the fantasy come to life. 

Allegedly, Muslims of the kind who make jihads despise music. It is thought to derange the senses and to distance the listener from God. But the Koran is music. The call to prayer is music, and praying itself is a musical experience since it involves collective recitation of an explicitly musical text, and then, at the end, when the imam conveys the community’s wishes to God, a few minutes of call and response and, well, singing. Of course, in a jihad, there are also hymns. They play in the background in every conveyance, office, and corridor. In the evenings in the eye hospital basement, the fighters often gathered in the prayer room to sing the al Qaeda hymns in full throated unison. Sample lyric: “bin Laden is our leader/ we destroyed the trade towers, with civil airplanes we did it/ reduced them to dust.”

I have no doubt if he is still alive, as I hope he is not, Kawa would say of the film the ISIS fighters made of their Crocus City Hall attack just what he said of his own violence: this is our music . How happy the fighters are, he would say, what unity of purpose they exhibit, and how boldly they make the ancient dream live. There is no difference between the dream the Moscow attackers inflicted on the Crocus City Hall and the one with which Kawa bludgeoned his hospital prisoners, almost all of whom were Syrian Muslims, by the way. The dream is of invulnerability before the enemies of Islam, of simple families living in harmony with the Koran, while every day, in some far flung corner of the globe, the soldiers of the caliphate bring another one of the infidel’s capitals to its knees.

In the Syrian jihad, the authorities made this dream live through singing, prayer, and hour after hour of recitation, as one would expect. Mostly, however, they made it live through violence. When the walls of an interrogation room rang with screams, or when a roomful of young men were watching some atrocity occur on a video screen, and, now and then, when twenty-five young men ran out into the hospital parking lot to fire their Kalashnikovs at the stars, the emotion of the occasion went straight to everyone’s brain stems. I knew roughly what was happening then because it was happening to me, too. 

When violence of this order is on every screen, lies behind every door, and hides, just beneath the surface, in the eyes of everyone you meet, you stop being yourself. That person dies. Under such circumstances, in my opinion, you’re grateful for the life you have, but because you expect to leave it soon, you do everything you can to relinquish your attachments to the here and now. You say goodbye. Over time, your thoughts are bound to turn to the future. I don’t see how they could not. Perhaps, you hope, life, of some kind, will somehow continue. Perhaps you will be surrounded by love at last? So the hymns tell you. The jihad is a loveless place, I’m sorry to say. Everyone dreams of being in love. So maybe it will come? Who can say that it will not? Certainly, new life—and with it, new power—will come to some. So the hymns say.

For whatever it’s worth, in Syria, I found that many of the younger terrorists I came to know were adept at slipping into the dream when they were inside the hospital, and adept at slipping out of it, in the evenings, when they went home to mom and dad. Outside, in the streets, as these young men often told me themselves, they looked and spoke like everyone else. Inside, they were  like zombies. They talked, automatically, of their longing for glorious death. Even when they were by themselves, they sang the hymns they were meant to sing. When the order came to torture, they threw themselves at their “work,” to borrow their word. Afterwards, I’m pretty sure, they had only the vaguest notion of why they did what they had done. 

The jihad needn’t be as impenetrable as all that. In fact, summonses to the dreams are audible in a thousand war hymns to be heard right now on YouTube. They’re visible in the many videos people who sympathize with the jihad produce. Often these videos seem innocuous enough because they consist mostly of a cappella singing and shots of young men thumbing through the Koran in a forest. To believers across the world, however, and to those who would like to believe, they give direct documentary evidence: the dream is real, the videos say. To make it live in London or Paris or wherever you happen to be, all you really have to do is to believe.

The organizers of the Paris Olympics are surely aware that as ISIS was planning out its 2015 attack on a Paris concert venue , it was also preparing to blow up the spectators at a soccer game in the Stade de France, just north of Paris. Is the outside world aware that the leaders of the international jihad feel about sporting events in the west roughly as they feel about rock concerts? These are soporifics, they believe, with which we drug ourselves by the millions. Meanwhile, every hour, somewhere on earth, our airplanes slaughter Muslim families. Are the authorities in Paris aware that their counterparts in the jihad mean to wake us from our stupor?

The news itself is a problem. When the violence in Gaza is spliced up, set to music, then sent out over the social networks, this material is powerful enough to do to a certain class of vulnerable young men—roughly what screaming in an underground room in Aleppo does. It entrances. It horrifies. It reveals the enemy for who he really is. It has a way of bringing all those who feel they’ll never have much hope into a dangerous kind of alignment. Are the Paris authorities aware of this? I hope so. The Olympic opening ceremony is set to occur along the banks of the Seine on what will surely be a balmy but tense Friday night this coming July.

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Holy Week 2024: Tabor Hill in Talamban, experience the authentic essence of Via Crucis

C EBU CITY, Philippines – This Holy Week, the Via Crucis, also known as the Stations of the Cross, is one of the most practiced form of devotion among Catholics, particularly in the Philippines.

The Via Crucis commemorates the events leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

It typically involves a series of 14 stations or scenes, each representing a specific event that occurred on the path Jesus took to his crucifixion on Mount Calvary.

Holy Week 2024: A peek into 7 Metro Cebu churches for Visita Iglesia

Holy Week 2024: Good Shepherd in Banawa, experiencing the hills and tranquility as you pray

In Cebu, the serene hills of Talamban in Cebu City host one of the most sought-after destinations for the Via Crucis or the Stations of the Cross, the OAD Tabor Hill.

The OAD Tabor Hill is a favored destination for devotees seeking an authentic setting that embodies sacrifice and personal devotion.

Its challenging terrain, descending from the first station downhill to the last station uphill, has provided an evocative backdrop for the Via Crucis experience.

Holy Week 2024: The Origin of OAD Tabor Hill

Reverend Peter Paul Arellano, OAD, the spokesperson for Holy Week 2024 and the information chairman of the Tabor Hill community, shared with CDN Digital how the place has evolved over the years of hosting pilgrims.

According to Rev. Arellano, OAD, Tabor Hill began when the first OAD missionary, Reverend Father Luigi Kerschbamer, arrived in the Philippines from Italy. He was chosen to serve in the country to fulfill a longstanding mission.

In 1994, Father Luigi started his mission in a simple house and later sought support from benefactors, along with two Filipino OAD priests.

Eventually, someone donated the land and they moved from Banilad, then Talamban, and finally settling in Tabor Hill around 1995.

Holy Week traditions: What is Visita Iglesia?

Holy Week 2024: Heritage churches beckon for ‘Visita Iglesia’

Rev. Arellano shared that the completion of Tabor Hill was a gradual process, with the initial community residing in lower Tabor, where a small house served as the “aspirancy” house of the OAD, built from nipa huts.

This location marked the establishment of the first seminary on Tabor Hill, evolving over time.

Inspired by Mount Tabor in Galilee, Israel, where Jesus Christ underwent his transfiguration, Rev. Arellano explained how the design of Tabor Hill’s chapel prominently features an altar depicting Jesus transfigured, with Moses and the Prophet Elijah on his left and right sides, echoing the scene of Jesus’ transfiguration.

Via Crucis: The 14th to 16th stations in OAD Tabor Hill

Rev. Arellano explained that while traditional Stations of the Cross typically have 12 to 14 stations, the one at OAD Tabor Hill have 16.

He clarified that these additional stations depict the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus, providing a more comprehensive journey through the key events of Jesus’ final days.

“Diri sa amoang station of the cross, we have 16 stations. Regularly, we have the 14 stations ra man but we included the 15th station which is the resurrection of Jesus and the 16th station which is the descent of the Holy spirit,” he explained.

(Here in our Stations of the Cross, we have 16 stations. Regularly, we have only 14 stations, but we included the 15th station, which is the resurrection of Jesus and the 16th station, which is the descent of the Holy Spirit.)

Holy Week 2024: Understanding the Sacred Triduum

Holy Week 2024: Religious places you can visit in Cebu

He added, “So somehow, we included sa (in the) stations of the cross [ang] passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus which is the main heart, purpose, or center of the Holy week.”

He also noted that devotees preferdre to hold the Via Crucis at Tabor Hill because they truly felt the sacrifice involved. As they progress through the stations, they ascend uphill, symbolizing the uphill journey of Jesus carrying the cross.

“We, Filipinos, mafeel man jud nato nu nga during the Holy Week or Lenten season, we need to give a little sacrifice. So somehow, Holy Week is related to the word ‘sacrifice’ for us… Even when we exert a little effort, when we exercise or sweat out murag maka ‘thanks, God’ nata ba,” he said.

(We, Filipinos, we can really feel that during the Holy Week or the Lenten season, we need to give a little sacrifice. So somehow, Holy Week is related to the word ‘sacrifice’ for us…Even when we exert a little effort, when we exercise or sweat out, it seems that we can say thanks to God.)

In terms of mass services, Rev. Arellano confirmed that OAD Tabor Hill hosts Sunday masses in the middle Tabor community, along with a Latin Mass, catering to various worship preferences.

Regarding Holy Week activities, he mentioned the availability of confession throughout the day starting from Holy Wednesday, as well as liturgical celebrations on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, and during the Easter vigil.

How to get there?

OAD Tabor Hill is more or less 10 kilometers away from Cebu City.

To reach Tabor Hill from Colon Street, opposite Super Metro Colon, Metro Wholesale Mart, or University of the Visayas (UV), you can take a jeepney bound for Talamban (13B or 13C) or Pit-os (62B or 62C).

If you’ve boarded a jeepney bound for Talamban (13B or 13C), alight at San Jose Bakeshop and arrange for a habal-habal ride to Tabor Hill.

For those on a jeepney bound for Pit-os (62B or 62C), get off at the corner across Savers Home Depot/Three Sixty Pharmacy and hire a habal-habal to Tabor Hill.

If you’re traveling by car, take the Talamban route and head towards Cebu North General Hospital. Upon reaching the hospital, turn right, then left at the sign indicating the way to Tabor Hill.

More photos of OAD Tabor Hill

All Photos were taken by Christian Dave Cuizon.

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Switching the Clocks Twice a Year Isn’t Just Annoying. It’s Deadly.

By Laura Prugh

Dr. Prugh is a wildlife biologist at the University of Washington.

An hour of the day will be unceremoniously snatched away on Sunday as we spring forward to daylight saving time.

Polling shows that more than half of Americans want to ditch the switch and prefer daylight saving over standard time by a margin of 10 to 20 points. But making that switch permanent would require an act of Congress, and while the Senate managed to pass a bill called the Sunshine Protection Act two years ago, the legislation never made it through the House. Worryingly, state legislators from Maine to the West Coast are now so fed up with waiting that they have introduced their own bills to remain on standard time permanently; states can do that without Congress.

But such a switch would be a mistake. It’s not just that our afternoons and evenings would be shrouded in more darkness, which often comes with higher crime, more vehicle collisions and fewer opportunities to enjoy the outdoors after work or school. There’s another problem with standard time, and it’s gone all but unnoticed until now. Last year, my research team showed that standard time leads to far more vehicles colliding with deer.

Vehicle strikes already kill millions of wild animals each year, and collisions with deer are the best documented because they are so common and damaging. When we looked at over one million collisions between deer and vehicles in 23 states across the United States from 1994 to 2021, we found these collisions are 14 times as likely in the two hours after sunset, compared with the two hours before. Deer behavior does not quite explain this, since they are equally active at dawn and dusk. But traffic volumes are higher in the evening, and it’s hard for us to see things in the dark. The hour-earlier sunset that comes with standard time is thus an expensive, traumatic way to control the deer population.

In all, we found that staying on daylight saving time year-round would prevent an estimated 36,550 collisions between deer and vehicles, whereas staying on standard time would add 73,660 of these collisions every year — a difference of more than 100,000. The human toll of staying on standard time would also be significant: Compared with year-round daylight saving time, year-round standard time would cause 100 more deaths, 6,000 more injuries and at least $3.5 billion in costs every year through increased deer-vehicle collisions alone.

Of course, having more crashes with deer is far from the only cost of standard time. The number of fatal traffic accidents at night — caused by deer or anything else — is three times as high as it is during the day, and in the dark the risk of pedestrian accidents is up to seven times as high. Permanent daylight saving time would prevent 366 fatal pedestrian and vehicle accidents a year with the help of brighter evenings during the four and a half months of the year we currently spend on standard time. Conversely, staying on standard time for an extra 7.5 months each year would add about 610 fatalities — a difference of nearly 1,000 human lives.

Support for standard time has been growing in recent years, driven in large part by sleep scientists who argue it’s better aligned with humans’ circadian rhythm. One clever study compared sleep patterns of people living on either side of time zone boundaries as proxies for having sunrise come an hour earlier versus later. Those living in the proxy standard time regime got an average of 19 minutes more sleep per day, and the same study valued the associated health benefits at more than $2 billion. This is an impressive benefit, but not enough to outweigh the $3.5 billion this country would be paying to fix the damage incurred by deer collisions should we establish permanent standard time.

The trump card of standard time proponents is that we tried permanent daylight saving time once before — in 1974. After it went into effect, only 42 percent of Americans favored the change. Some parents disliked sending their children to school in the dark, and in only a few weeks, eight schoolchildren were hit by vehicles and killed in Florida alone, convincing lawmakers to reverse the shift.

Eight deaths may sound like a lot, but if you look at the country as a whole, morning fatalities of schoolchildren barely rose that January, from 19 to 20 — a shift that could be explained by normal year-to-year fluctuations. And if we were again to try making daylight saving time permanent, we’d save many more lives in the evenings.

I can understand why parents are worried about sending their children to school in the dark. But the best solution to that problem would be to have school start later. (Already many medical associations support this because of the variety of health benefits it could offer children, including the fact that they would get more sleep.)

If we moved to permanent daylight saving time, we could prevent hundreds of traffic deaths and tens of thousands of collisions between deer and vehicles. Robberies could drop by 7 percent.

Congress has the power to make this a reality. The Sunshine Protection Act was reintroduced to the House and Senate last March with broad bipartisan support, only to languish in the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee for a year. It’s up to the leaders of these committees to prioritize the issue this spring.

Every year, we gripe about the time switch, demand action and then return to our daily lives. But the toll on people and wildlife is too large to do this year after year. And the longer Congress waits, the greater the risk of state bills for permanent standard time passing, making things worse instead of better. It’s time to spring forward permanently and enjoy the benefits of brighter evenings year-round.

Laura Prugh is a wildlife biologist at the University of Washington.

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