Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama : Back to School Event

Arlington, Virginia
September 8, 2009

The President: Hello everyone – how’s everybody doing today? I’m here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we’ve got students tuning in from all across America, kindergarten through twelfth grade. I’m glad you all could join us today.

I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school. And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, it’s your first day in a new school, so it’s understandable if you’re a little nervous. I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now, with just one more year to go. And no matter what grade you’re in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer, and you could’ve stayed in bed just a little longer this morning.

I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn’t have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday – at 4:30 in the morning.

History of Football

The history of football is generally traced back to it's beginnings in rugby. The English game that is very similar to football and soccer which also began in England back in the early 1800's.

The college campuses of Ivy League schools all played similar variations of football through the mid 1800’s. Then shortly after the end of the Civil War around the 1860’s some of the colleges began playing organized football. Princeton University frontiered some of the basic rules of football and the game became patented. It seems odd to be able to patent a game but nonetheless the sport began to grow. The first football game in college football history was then played in 1869 between Princeton and Rutgers with Rutgers as the victor thus producing football history.

College Football History took another big step in 1873 when a number of colleges met to form the first rules of the game and established the amount of players on each squad. The coach for Yale, Walter Camp assisted the final step in the change from rugby style football to the American style. He limited the number of players to eleven on each team and sized the football field to 110 yards. He then created the downs system in 1882 which was originally three downs to gain 5 yards and then changed to 4 downs to gain 10 yards.

History of Cheerleading

The history of cheerleading originates from the United States in the late 1880's with your average crowd yelling and chanting to encourage their team. No one is quite sure how they documented that it was the first cheer ever but credit is given to Princeton University in 1884 for coming up with a Princeton cheer and marking there place in cheerleading history.

Part 8 - Examples of Good and Bad Writing

Part 7 - Extra Touches

"Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?"
-- Bernice Fitz-Gibbon
"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."
-- Thomas Edison

The difference between a good essay and a great essay often lies in elements that take it above and beyond what most students hand in. Sometimes it is as simple as avoiding common things that detract from formality, such as hyperbole and colloquialisms. Sometimes it's adding extras, such as contradictions or extra research. Here are some tips on improving essays:

• Avoid Hyperbole
• Avoid Libel
• Avoid Colloquialisms
• Avoid Personalization
• Avoid Gender Limitations
• Avoid Using The Same Word Repeatedly
• Contradiction and Argument
• Extra Research
• Graphics and Tables
• Use of Humour, Puns, and Clever Twists

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Part 6 - The Finished Product

Reading Your Essay Over

It seems no matter how many times students are advised to do this, they keep ignoring it. It is probably the single most important thing you can do to improve your essay: READ IT OVER TO YOURSELF! That means actually read it, don't skim it. If you find that your brain inadvertently skims it, try reading it out loud and listen to how it sounds. Do the sentences sound jarring? Does it make sense? If you hadn't researched it, would you understand it?

To improve further, GET A FRIEND TO READ THE ESSAY as well. They may find inadvertent errors such as spell-check failures (i.e. "from" when you mean "form" and vice versa), bad edits (i.e. Smith went to the a store (forgot to remove "a" or "the")), repetitions (i.e. He said, "Blah blah blah," he said), and other elements you may miss after staring at it for so long. Furthermore, if your friend is completely confused as to what you mean by a particular sentence, paragraph, or the entire essay, you know you have done something wrong. You don't have to accept every bit of nitpicking advice from your friend, but keep in mind that if they don't understand your phrasing, your teacher or professor may not either.

Part 5 - Writing the Essay

"Do not write so that you can be understood, write so that you cannot be misunderstood."
-- Epictetus

Now that you have a solid outline, it's time to knit the point-form bits together into formal prose. Part of this will just be creating proper sentences out of the notes, but much of it will be putting in your analysis and segues. It is this second part that makes the difference between a ho-hum regurgitation and an essay that actually has something to say. In my opinion, it is the main difference between a B paper and an A paper. Anyone can read and regurgitate, but it takes skill to analyse and bring things together to make an overall coherent point.

Writing your essay is like building a brick wall: if you leave gaping holes all over the place, the entire structure will be weak at best, and may crumble entirely. Even though you're now educated on your topic and think much of it is obvious, it is essential to assume your reader doesn't know much about the topic, unless otherwise specified in the assignment. You should assume your reader knows what the average layperson knows about the subject and write accordingly. This means you should explain what things do, who people are, and how it all fits together instead of just assuming something about your topic is common knowledge. It is better to have a couple sentences that are obvious than to leave the reader confused.

Part 4 - Planning Your Essay

"When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing."
-- Enrique Jardiel Poncela

You've gone from an idea, to research, to a pile of random notes, to categorized notes. You're now ready to start planning how the essay will fit together.

Formal essays differ from informal essays in several ways, most of which will be covered in the section on writing. During the planning stage, you need to know whether or not the essay is going to be a formal one. If the teacher or professor didn't specify, they probably want it to be formal. An informal essay is one that doesn't necessarily rely on structure to make its point, such as an essay explaining how you personally feel on a given subject, or what you did last summer. Formal essays must have an underlying structure that makes sense so the reader doesn't have to wonder where you're going with your points.

For most of these instructions and tips, we'll assume you're working on a formal essay.

Start by putting the subgroups that you pulled out of your focus into a logical order. Consider the reader's point of view: they may not have read all the sources you have on your topic, and might need definitions first. If you're discussing a person's life and contributions as in our example, it's probably more logical to describe the person and their life before bringing in the bits about their contributions. If your subject is a historical overview of anything, it usually makes sense to move chronologically.

Part 3 - Compiling Your Notes

Now that you've done the bulk of your research, you should have several pages (on the computer, on paper, or both) of point-form notes. In those notes should be full quotations you intend to use or paraphrase later, as well as general notes that you've already summarized or paraphrased. If you sit down to write the essay with this pile of unsorted stuff, inevitably you'll have trouble deciding where to begin and you'll keep leaving things out. It is much easier to group the notes, plan the essay, and then write, rather than trying to stick random bits in as you go.

This is where a good supply of coloured pens or highlighters comes in handy (on the computer, you can make use of a word processor's various coloured highlighting tools). If these things are unavailable, you can still make do by coming up with notations that indicate the different sections and writing them beside the individual points in the notes.

Look at your focus. Chances are it has several different elements to it, and now is the time to break out those elements separately. Don't worry about what element should come first or last, that will be sorted out in the planning stage next. For now, you're just going to group your notes according to where they fit into your focus.

Part 2 - The Proposal

If your essay requires a proposal, do not assume you can whip together something quickly and consider it complete. Chances are, if a professor is requesting an essay proposal at all (which means more work for them to do), they intend to actually pay attention to it. It may even have a grade value as part of the overall essay. You will likely be held to promises made in the proposal, so don't state that you'll do impossible things under the assumption that the professor will be impressed.

You should already be well into your research by the time you hand in a proposal. If your proposal is to sound at all informed, you should have already skimmed through some sources to get a feel for the topic. Your research may not be complete, but you should know some of the sources you will use and where your focus lies.

Proposals are usually very specific to the assignment, so be sure to read the assignment carefully. Ensure that you cover all necessary aspects of the assignment in the proposal. Even if you don't fully explain every section - after all, it's not the full essay - do be sure to include the sections you plan to discuss. Also be sure that your list of resources is comprised of books you can actually get and truly plan to read.

Part 1 - Research

"When you take stuff from one writer it's plagiarism; but when you take it from many writers, it's research."
-- Wilson Mizner (1876-1933)

Focus

There are those who say that before you can research or write, you must first choose a focus and stick to it. While that is good advice in some cases, there are times when your focus should change during the research process. For example, you might decide to write on a topic only to discover a more interesting, more relevant, or more easily researched topic while trying to find materials on the original topic. For this reason, you should not submit a proposal for an essay (if required) or otherwise make your focus concrete until you've done some preliminary research. That doesn't mean reading every book on the subject; rather, you should ascertain what sort of materials are available on the subject at all. When you do your basic search, keep in mind the following indications:

• If you find an endless supply of possible sources right away, your topic is too broad, and you'll have to dig down into the subject more deeply to find a more suitable focus.
• If you can't find any possible sources after a serious search, your topic may be too narrow or too new. While this could serve as an excellent topic for a thesis in that it provides opportunity for original study, it is probably going to be inappropriate for an early-university or high school essay.
• The Internet is a fabulous source of knowledge. It is also a fabulous source of utter nonsense. If all of your sources are Internet-based and you can't find any book sources, you have to seriously consider the validity of the subject matter for a university essay. Even cutting-edge technology has books and articles available that describe the basics of the technology.
• If all of the sources seem to be written by the same person or group of people, you must again seriously consider the validity of the topic. It might be too narrow, or it might be generated by 'crackpots,' or it might be a great topic that has not been written about often enough. Discuss the topic with your teacher/professor.
• If you find a good source, search again under the author's name in case they have another useful book that you didn't find in the first search.

How To Write An Essay

When I was in university, I helped friends by typing and proofreading their essays. I found that most people's writing was decent, but a few had managed to get through high school without learning how to construct a basic paragraph, let alone an entire essay. That was Ontario, where, at the time, high school went to grade 13 and the education system was fairly good. Now I live in the US, where high schools seem to churn out graduates that, for the most part, don't seem to know how to construct an essay. So many students making so many of the same errors must be indicative of a failing by the school system and not a lack of intelligence or ability in the students.

Thus, as a service to my husband's students who sometimes have to write essays, as well as a service to the greater Internet community beyond, I have put together the following tips and instructions on how to construct a good essay for a university class.