出版与作家生涯2014vice.com
我替中国学生代写常春藤申请文书
I Ghostwrite Chinese Students' Ivy League Admissions Essays
导读
这篇第一人称报道讲述一位写手为申请常春藤的中国学生代写申请文书，并由此讨论申请包装、真实性与留学文书产业。对写作者而言，它提醒我们：个人陈述的核心不是华丽包装，而是真实、具体的自我梳理；代写和顾问脚本会让学生失去一次重要的反思与表达训练。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
写个人陈述时先花时间梳理自己的经历，找出最能代表你的具体片段，而不是先套模板或买“范文”。
- 02
不要把自己的故事外包给顾问或代写：写作过程本身就是厘清“我为什么申请、我是谁”的思考训练。
- 03
真实性靠细节支撑：写中国场景就要符合中国生活常识，编造细节会让整篇文书露馅。
- 04
警惕“包装整个人设”的顾问式写作——堆砌课程、社团和志愿时长，不如写出一两个真实而有反思的瞬间。
HN 评论精选
自己写文书是一次宝贵的自我反思，代写和顾问脚本会剥夺独立思考与真实表达。
作为两年前申请美国研究生的中国学生，这个故事让我觉得有趣又有点难过，虽然我一直知道中国有代写。和文中富裕学生不同，我家很穷，连申请费都不轻松；我也不喜欢不真实和作弊，所以所有文书都自己写，没买指南也没付钱。我搜遍自己的世界，放入最能代表自己的片段，写了三个月，这是一次很棒的学习经历。后来UBC教授问我有没有母语者帮忙润色，一个月后NYU Tisch院长又来信说我的文书让他感动、印象深刻；那年秋天我去了Stanford。中国教育常让我们不擅长独立思考、习惯标准答案和脚本，出国申请本该是重新思考的机会，但咨询服务与代写又给了拐杖和脚本。
nicolax查看英文原文
As a Chinese student who applied to US grad schools 2 years ago, this story is interesting and somewhat sad to me, even though I always know such ghostwriting exists in China. Unlike the wealthy Chinese students described in this story, my family is poor--even paying the application fees is no easy. Besides, I really don't like being unauthentic and cheating. I wrote all the essays myself, without buying any guides or paying anyone. Just like in this story, I searched every corner of my world and put in pieces that most represent myself. The writing process took me 3 months, which was an incredible learning experience. In the spring when I was doing a video chat with a professor from UBC, she asked me whether I had any native speaker to help on my writing (legit to ask, I should say). One month later, I got a personal email from the chair of NYU Tisch school of Arts, that he's moved and impressed by my essay. It was reassuring the efforts paid off (at least it stood out from the fake authenticity). That fall I came to Stanford. Thanks to Chinese education, Chinese students are usually very weak on independent thinking, we're trained to give standard answers and follow certain scripts. Applying for schools abroad is a good opportunity to re-think and re-learn. But apparently all the "consulting" services, ghostwriters have provided again, crutch to rely on and scripts to follow. After coming to the US, as they probably haven't thought clearly about why they came here, many Chinese students fail to make the best use of their time here. It can also water down the quality of education programs, as some of the students are under-qualified or not motivated.
顾问行业不只代写文书，还在包装整个人设，制造虚假的自主性。
首先——哇，她真是个有才华的写手，难怪客户结果那么好。大学申请文书造假不仅在中国猖獗，在美国也很猖獗（我猜许多地方都是），但问题其实更严重：随着“大学顾问”行业繁荣，专业人士实际上在替客户“伪造”整个高中生涯——告诉他们上什么课、加入哪些社团、去哪里做多少小时志愿者。最终这些客户看起来像极有产出自驱力的学生，现实中他们只是照着父母花大钱请来的成年人写的脚本走。
asdfologist查看英文原文
First of all - wow, what a talented writer. No wonder her clients have done so well. Forgery of college admissions essays is rampant not just in China but also in the US (and I suspect in many other places), but actually the problem is really much worse than that. With the boom of the "college consultants" industry, professionals are essentially "forging" entire high school careers on behalf of their clients - telling them what classes to take, which clubs to join, where and how many hours they should volunteer, etc. The end result is that these clients look like amazingly productive students with a superhuman sense of self-initiative, whereas in reality these kids simply followed a script written by some adult their parents paid large sums of money for.
代写现象暴露出部分课程作业和学位要求过低，问题不只在于个人道德。
作者分享自己曾短暂为代写服务写学期论文：工作轻松、报酬不错。他起初内疚，但很快觉得多数作业很平庸，客户外包也没错过多少学习价值；他质疑，为什么大学会布置聪明但未受训练的人5-10小时就能完成的“重要”作业。他认为真正的丑闻不是有人付费求助，而是许多学位项目对知识和思考要求太低、容易被钻空子；最意外的是，除外语学生外，教育专业学生似乎是代写服务的最大用户。
jurassic查看英文原文
Really interesting piece. In my post-college lull, I was once in a major financial bind and ended up doing a brief stint as an academic ghostwriter. I wrote term papers, not admission essays, for a ghostwriting service over a period of about 2 months. The work was easy and the money was good. I felt pretty guilty doing the work at first, but I quickly realized that most of the assignments were so banal that I don't think the clients missed out on much learning value by outsourcing it. Why are college courses giving "major" assignments that can reasonably be completed in 5-10 hours by a smart person with no training in the field? If a college degree just means you banged out a bunch of garbage essays, as it does for many people based on the assignments I saw contracted out, should we really be outraged that some people are not doing the work themselves? I would argue that the real scandal is not that some people are paying for help, but that many degree programs demand so little in terms of knowledge and thought that they can be easily gamed in this way. I would like to see fluffy degree programs ended, so that legitimate work in the humanities can continue without anyone wasting time and resources shuffling average Joes through the pipeline to middle class office jobs. The most surprising discovery for me was that it seemed like after foreign language students the heaviest users of the service were education majors. No joke. I never figured out if the noticeably heavy use by education majors was a selection bias caused by the way the service was advertising itself, a sign of especially low ethics among education majors, or an indication that there might be a higher incidence of lifestyle factors (e.g. going to school while working full time) that made it difficult for them to crank out all the BS assignments required of them. It's also interesting to me that the author of this piece seems to be an independent contractor whose business increased as she became known. Generally, I would expect ghostwriters to want to keep a low profile which makes it hard to be independent. I certainly didn't want anyone knowing how I was paying the bills when I was in it. And unless you are charging top-end rates, the overhead of marketing yourself and picking up envelopes of cash at Starbucks is probably an inefficient use of time. Both of these factors mean that a lot of people end up working for agencies that do the work of finding clients and managing payments, and also provide double blinding. So the writer never knows the identity of the client, and vice versa. It's a pretty good system overall.
编造细节若脱离真实生活环境，会让所谓“真实故事”立刻露馅。
她为一个中国学生写了篇文书，讲他妈妈在自助洗衣店洗衣服，离开去办事，回来发现衣服被偷了。在中国，把东西放在公共场所无人看管确实很可能被拿走（而且没人会期待不同结果），但中国没有自助洗衣店。从来没有。可似乎参与其中的人都不在意。这就像中国代写写一个感人的故事：美国孩子的妈妈不得不在KTV酒吧打双份工，某晚回家发现丈夫的臭豆腐摊被城管没收了。
gaoshan查看英文原文
She wrote an essay for a Chinese student about her mother washing clothes in a laundromat, leaving them to run errands and returning to find the clothes stolen. While leaving one's belongings unattended in a public place in China would indeed likely result in them being taken (and no one in China would do such a thing expecting anything different), China doesn't have laundromats. Never has. Not that anyone involved seems to care. It would be like a Chinese ghost writer crafting a touching tale of an American kid's mom having to work double shifts in a KTV bar only to return home one night and find that her husband's chou tofu stand had been confiscated by the Chengguan.
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