I am having a huge breakdown with college essay requirements for my honors class
I am literally losing my mind over this honors seminar assignment. The prompt is so incredibly vague that I spent the last three days staring at a blank google doc. It basically asks us to "reflect on a systemic issue through a deeply personal lens" but then says we cannot use first person pronouns like "I" or "my" because it has to remain academic. How on earth do you write a deeply personal reflection without using "I" or "me"?
I even asked some friends for college essay help on this because they usually have good ideas but they were just as confused as me. One of them told me to just write it normally and then use find and replace to edit out all the pronouns, which sounds like an absolute disaster. It would just read like some weird alien trying to pretend to be human.
I tried emailing the professor to ask what should i write my college essay about if we cant use personal stories without pronouns. Her reply was literally just "refer to the syllabus" which does not help at all. The syllabus just repeats the exact same prompt word for word. I am so tired of professors who try to make their assignments sound super deep and philosophical but actually just give zero clear directions. At this point im probably just going to write a generic paper about traffic infrastructure and hope she doesn't actually read it.
Update: Appreciate all the suggestions in the comments! Ended up digging around online yesterday to see how people usually bypass this prompt constraint. I came across EssayFox through one of their free guide articles on objective academic writing and decided to actually test them out for a quick structural edit.
I sent over my rough draft where I wrote about a local community issue, and they reframed the whole thing into an "anonymous observer" perspective within 6 hours. Removed every single hidden "I/my" while keeping the personal tone completely intact and formatting the citations properly. Honestly saved me from a total breakdown - if anyone else is stuck on vague honors prompts, using their editing/formatting service is a solid workaround instead of starting from scratch.