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The impact of community service – a deep dive into the power of giving back to society.

Community service essay

Community service essays serve as a powerful tool for individuals to reflect on their experiences, values, and impact on the world around them. Through the process of writing about their volunteer work, students are able to articulate the positive changes they have made in their communities and explore the lessons they have learned along the way.

Community service essays also play a crucial role in highlighting the importance of giving back to society and fostering a sense of empathy and compassion in individuals. By sharing personal stories of service, students can inspire others to get involved and make a difference in their own communities.

Moreover, community service essays can help students gain valuable skills such as critical thinking, communication, and problem-solving, as they reflect on the challenges and successes of their volunteer experiences. By documenting their service work, students can also showcase their commitment to social responsibility and community engagement to colleges, scholarship committees, and potential employers.

Why Community Service Essays Matter

In today’s society, the importance of community service essays cannot be overstated. These essays serve as a platform for individuals to showcase their dedication to helping others and making a positive impact on their communities. Through these essays, individuals can share their experiences, insights, and perspectives on the value of giving back to society.

Community service essays also play a crucial role in raising awareness about different social issues and encouraging others to get involved in volunteer work. By sharing personal stories and reflections, individuals can inspire and motivate others to take action and contribute to the betterment of society.

Furthermore, community service essays provide an opportunity for individuals to reflect on their own values, beliefs, and goals. Through the process of writing these essays, individuals can gain a deeper understanding of themselves and their place in the world, leading to personal growth and development.

In conclusion, community service essays matter because they have the power to inspire change, raise awareness, and promote personal growth. By sharing their stories and insights, individuals can make a difference in their communities and create a more compassionate and giving society.

The Impact of Community Service Essays

Community service essays have a profound impact on both the individuals writing them and the communities they serve. These essays serve as a platform for students to reflect on their experiences and articulate the lessons they have learned through their service work.

One of the primary impacts of community service essays is the opportunity for self-reflection. Students are encouraged to critically analyze their experiences, challenges, and accomplishments during their community service activities. This reflection helps students develop a deeper understanding of themselves, their values, and their role in the community.

Another significant impact of community service essays is the awareness they raise about social issues and community needs. By sharing their stories and insights, students can shed light on important issues and inspire others to get involved in community service. These essays can also help community organizations and stakeholders better understand the needs of their communities and how they can address them effectively.

Overall, community service essays play a vital role in promoting social responsibility, empathy, and civic engagement. They empower students to make a positive impact in their communities and contribute to creating a more compassionate and inclusive society.

Guidelines for Writing Community Service Essays

When writing a community service essay, it is important to follow certain guidelines to ensure that your message is clear and impactful. Here are some tips to help you craft a powerful and compelling essay:

  • Start by brainstorming ideas and reflecting on your community service experiences.
  • Clearly define the purpose of your essay and what you hope to convey to your readers.
  • Organize your essay with a clear introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion.
  • Use specific examples and anecdotes to support your points and showcase your personal growth.
  • Highlight the impact of your community service activities on both yourself and others.
  • Showcase your passion and dedication to serving your community.
  • Be authentic and honest in your writing, and avoid exaggerating or embellishing your experiences.
  • Edit and proofread your essay carefully to ensure clarity, coherence, and proper grammar.

Examples of Effective Community Service Essays

Examples of Effective Community Service Essays

Community service essays can have a powerful impact on the reader when they are well-written and thoughtful. Here are a few examples to inspire you:

1. A Well-Structured Essay:

This essay begins with a compelling introduction that clearly articulates the author’s motivation for engaging in community service. The body paragraphs provide specific examples of the author’s experiences and the impact they had on both the community and themselves. The conclusion ties everything together, reflecting on the lessons learned and the importance of giving back.

2. Personal Reflection:

This essay delves deep into the author’s personal experiences during their community service work. It explores the challenges they faced, the emotions they encountered, and the growth they underwent. By sharing vulnerable moments and candid reflections, the author creates a connection with the reader and demonstrates the transformational power of service.

3. Future Goals and Impact:

This essay not only discusses past community service experiences but also looks toward the future. The author shares their aspirations for continued service and outlines how they plan to make a difference in the world. By showcasing a sense of purpose and vision, this essay inspires the reader to consider their own potential for impact.

These examples illustrate how community service essays can be effective tools for conveying meaningful stories, inspiring others, and showcasing personal growth. By crafting a compelling narrative and reflecting on the significance of service, you can create an essay that leaves a lasting impression.

How Community Service Essays Empower Individuals

Community service essays provide individuals with a platform to express their thoughts, share their experiences, and make a meaningful impact on society. By writing about their volunteer work and the lessons they have learned, individuals can empower themselves to create positive change and inspire others to do the same.

  • Through community service essays, individuals can reflect on the importance of giving back to their communities and the value of helping those in need.
  • These essays can serve as a source of motivation and inspiration for individuals to continue their philanthropic efforts and make a difference in the world.
  • By sharing their stories through community service essays, individuals can raise awareness about social issues and promote greater empathy and understanding among their peers.

Overall, community service essays empower individuals to take action, advocate for change, and contribute to building a more compassionate and equitable society.

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How to Write a Great Community Service Essay

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College Admissions , Extracurriculars

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Are you applying to a college or a scholarship that requires a community service essay? Do you know how to write an essay that will impress readers and clearly show the impact your work had on yourself and others?

Read on to learn step-by-step instructions for writing a great community service essay that will help you stand out and be memorable.

What Is a Community Service Essay? Why Do You Need One?

A community service essay is an essay that describes the volunteer work you did and the impact it had on you and your community. Community service essays can vary widely depending on specific requirements listed in the application, but, in general, they describe the work you did, why you found the work important, and how it benefited people around you.

Community service essays are typically needed for two reasons:

#1: To Apply to College

  • Some colleges require students to write community service essays as part of their application or to be eligible for certain scholarships.
  • You may also choose to highlight your community service work in your personal statement.

#2: To Apply for Scholarships

  • Some scholarships are specifically awarded to students with exceptional community service experiences, and many use community service essays to help choose scholarship recipients.
  • Green Mountain College offers one of the most famous of these scholarships. Their "Make a Difference Scholarship" offers full tuition, room, and board to students who have demonstrated a significant, positive impact through their community service

Getting Started With Your Essay

In the following sections, I'll go over each step of how to plan and write your essay. I'll also include sample excerpts for you to look through so you can get a better idea of what readers are looking for when they review your essay.

Step 1: Know the Essay Requirements

Before your start writing a single word, you should be familiar with the essay prompt. Each college or scholarship will have different requirements for their essay, so make sure you read these carefully and understand them.

Specific things to pay attention to include:

  • Length requirement
  • Application deadline
  • The main purpose or focus of the essay
  • If the essay should follow a specific structure

Below are three real community service essay prompts. Read through them and notice how much they vary in terms of length, detail, and what information the writer should include.

From the Equitable Excellence Scholarship:

"Describe your outstanding achievement in depth and provide the specific planning, training, goals, and steps taken to make the accomplishment successful. Include details about your role and highlight leadership you provided. Your essay must be a minimum of 350 words but not more than 600 words."

From the Laura W. Bush Traveling Scholarship:

"Essay (up to 500 words, double spaced) explaining your interest in being considered for the award and how your proposed project reflects or is related to both UNESCO's mandate and U.S. interests in promoting peace by sharing advances in education, science, culture, and communications."

From the LULAC National Scholarship Fund:

"Please type or print an essay of 300 words (maximum) on how your academic studies will contribute to your personal & professional goals. In addition, please discuss any community service or extracurricular activities you have been involved in that relate to your goals."

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Step 2: Brainstorm Ideas

Even after you understand what the essay should be about, it can still be difficult to begin writing. Answer the following questions to help brainstorm essay ideas. You may be able to incorporate your answers into your essay.

  • What community service activity that you've participated in has meant the most to you?
  • What is your favorite memory from performing community service?
  • Why did you decide to begin community service?
  • What made you decide to volunteer where you did?
  • How has your community service changed you?
  • How has your community service helped others?
  • How has your community service affected your plans for the future?

You don't need to answer all the questions, but if you find you have a lot of ideas for one of two of them, those may be things you want to include in your essay.

Writing Your Essay

How you structure your essay will depend on the requirements of the scholarship or school you are applying to. You may give an overview of all the work you did as a volunteer, or highlight a particularly memorable experience. You may focus on your personal growth or how your community benefited.

Regardless of the specific structure requested, follow the guidelines below to make sure your community service essay is memorable and clearly shows the impact of your work.

Samples of mediocre and excellent essays are included below to give you a better idea of how you should draft your own essay.

Step 1: Hook Your Reader In

You want the person reading your essay to be interested, so your first sentence should hook them in and entice them to read more. A good way to do this is to start in the middle of the action. Your first sentence could describe you helping build a house, releasing a rescued animal back to the wild, watching a student you tutored read a book on their own, or something else that quickly gets the reader interested. This will help set your essay apart and make it more memorable.

Compare these two opening sentences:

"I have volunteered at the Wishbone Pet Shelter for three years."

"The moment I saw the starving, mud-splattered puppy brought into the shelter with its tail between its legs, I knew I'd do whatever I could to save it."

The first sentence is a very general, bland statement. The majority of community service essays probably begin a lot like it, but it gives the reader little information and does nothing to draw them in. On the other hand, the second sentence begins immediately with action and helps persuade the reader to keep reading so they can learn what happened to the dog.

Step 2: Discuss the Work You Did

Once you've hooked your reader in with your first sentence, tell them about your community service experiences. State where you work, when you began working, how much time you've spent there, and what your main duties include. This will help the reader quickly put the rest of the essay in context and understand the basics of your community service work.

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Not including basic details about your community service could leave your reader confused.

Step 3: Include Specific Details

It's the details of your community service that make your experience unique and memorable, so go into the specifics of what you did.

For example, don't just say you volunteered at a nursing home; talk about reading Mrs. Johnson her favorite book, watching Mr. Scott win at bingo, and seeing the residents play games with their grandchildren at the family day you organized. Try to include specific activities, moments, and people in your essay. Having details like these let the readers really understand what work you did and how it differs from other volunteer experiences.

Compare these two passages:

"For my volunteer work, I tutored children at a local elementary school. I helped them improve their math skills and become more confident students."

"As a volunteer at York Elementary School, I worked one-on-one with second and third graders who struggled with their math skills, particularly addition, subtraction, and fractions. As part of my work, I would create practice problems and quizzes and try to connect math to the students' interests. One of my favorite memories was when Sara, a student I had been working with for several weeks, told me that she enjoyed the math problems I had created about a girl buying and selling horses so much that she asked to help me create math problems for other students."

The first passage only gives basic information about the work done by the volunteer; there is very little detail included, and no evidence is given to support her claims. How did she help students improve their math skills? How did she know they were becoming more confident?

The second passage is much more detailed. It recounts a specific story and explains more fully what kind of work the volunteer did, as well as a specific instance of a student becoming more confident with her math skills. Providing more detail in your essay helps support your claims as well as make your essay more memorable and unique.

Step 4: Show Your Personality

It would be very hard to get a scholarship or place at a school if none of your readers felt like they knew much about you after finishing your essay, so make sure that your essay shows your personality. The way to do this is to state your personal strengths, then provide examples to support your claims. Take some time to think about which parts of your personality you would like your essay to highlight, then write about specific examples to show this.

  • If you want to show that you're a motivated leader, describe a time when you organized an event or supervised other volunteers.
  • If you want to show your teamwork skills, write about a time you helped a group of people work together better.
  • If you want to show that you're a compassionate animal lover, write about taking care of neglected shelter animals and helping each of them find homes.

Step 5: State What You Accomplished

After you have described your community service and given specific examples of your work, you want to begin to wrap your essay up by stating your accomplishments. What was the impact of your community service? Did you build a house for a family to move into? Help students improve their reading skills? Clean up a local park? Make sure the impact of your work is clear; don't be worried about bragging here.

If you can include specific numbers, that will also strengthen your essay. Saying "I delivered meals to 24 home-bound senior citizens" is a stronger example than just saying "I delivered meals to lots of senior citizens."

Also be sure to explain why your work matters. Why is what you did important? Did it provide more parks for kids to play in? Help students get better grades? Give people medical care who would otherwise not have gotten it? This is an important part of your essay, so make sure to go into enough detail that your readers will know exactly what you accomplished and how it helped your community.

"My biggest accomplishment during my community service was helping to organize a family event at the retirement home. The children and grandchildren of many residents attended, and they all enjoyed playing games and watching movies together."

"The community service accomplishment that I'm most proud of is the work I did to help organize the First Annual Family Fun Day at the retirement home. My job was to design and organize fun activities that senior citizens and their younger relatives could enjoy. The event lasted eight hours and included ten different games, two performances, and a movie screening with popcorn. Almost 200 residents and family members attended throughout the day. This event was important because it provided an opportunity for senior citizens to connect with their family members in a way they aren't often able to. It also made the retirement home seem more fun and enjoyable to children, and we have seen an increase in the number of kids coming to visit their grandparents since the event."

The second passage is stronger for a variety of reasons. First, it goes into much more detail about the work the volunteer did. The first passage only states that she helped "organize a family event." That really doesn't tell readers much about her work or what her responsibilities were. The second passage is much clearer; her job was to "design and organize fun activities."

The second passage also explains the event in more depth. A family day can be many things; remember that your readers are likely not familiar with what you're talking about, so details help them get a clearer picture.

Lastly, the second passage makes the importance of the event clear: it helped residents connect with younger family members, and it helped retirement homes seem less intimidating to children, so now some residents see their grand kids more often.

Step 6: Discuss What You Learned

One of the final things to include in your essay should be the impact that your community service had on you. You can discuss skills you learned, such as carpentry, public speaking, animal care, or another skill.

You can also talk about how you changed personally. Are you more patient now? More understanding of others? Do you have a better idea of the type of career you want? Go into depth about this, but be honest. Don't say your community service changed your life if it didn't because trite statements won't impress readers.

In order to support your statements, provide more examples. If you say you're more patient now, how do you know this? Do you get less frustrated while playing with your younger siblings? Are you more willing to help group partners who are struggling with their part of the work? You've probably noticed by now that including specific examples and details is one of the best ways to create a strong and believable essay .

"As a result of my community service, I learned a lot about building houses and became a more mature person."

"As a result of my community service, I gained hands-on experience in construction. I learned how to read blueprints, use a hammer and nails, and begin constructing the foundation of a two-bedroom house. Working on the house could be challenging at times, but it taught me to appreciate the value of hard work and be more willing to pitch in when I see someone needs help. My dad has just started building a shed in our backyard, and I offered to help him with it because I know from my community service how much work it is. I also appreciate my own house more, and I know how lucky I am to have a roof over my head."

The second passage is more impressive and memorable because it describes the skills the writer learned in more detail and recounts a specific story that supports her claim that her community service changed her and made her more helpful.

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Step 7: Finish Strong

Just as you started your essay in a way that would grab readers' attention, you want to finish your essay on a strong note as well. A good way to end your essay is to state again the impact your work had on you, your community, or both. Reiterate how you changed as a result of your community service, why you found the work important, or how it helped others.

Compare these two concluding statements:

"In conclusion, I learned a lot from my community service at my local museum, and I hope to keep volunteering and learning more about history."

"To conclude, volunteering at my city's American History Museum has been a great experience. By leading tours and participating in special events, I became better at public speaking and am now more comfortable starting conversations with people. In return, I was able to get more community members interested in history and our local museum. My interest in history has deepened, and I look forward to studying the subject in college and hopefully continuing my volunteer work at my university's own museum."

The second passage takes each point made in the first passage and expands upon it. In a few sentences, the second passage is able to clearly convey what work the volunteer did, how she changed, and how her volunteer work benefited her community.

The author of the second passage also ends her essay discussing her future and how she'd like to continue her community service, which is a good way to wrap things up because it shows your readers that you are committed to community service for the long-term.

What's Next?

Are you applying to a community service scholarship or thinking about it? We have a complete list of all the community service scholarships available to help get your search started!

Do you need a community service letter as well? We have a step-by-step guide that will tell you how to get a great reference letter from your community service supervisor.

Thinking about doing community service abroad? Before you sign up, read our guide on some of the hazards of international volunteer trips and how to know if it's the right choice for you.

Want to improve your SAT score by 160 points or your ACT score by 4 points?   We've written a guide for each test about the top 5 strategies you must be using to have a shot at improving your score. Download them for free now:

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Christine graduated from Michigan State University with degrees in Environmental Biology and Geography and received her Master's from Duke University. In high school she scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT and was named a National Merit Finalist. She has taught English and biology in several countries.

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Tips for Writing a Standout Community Service Essay

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Through your college applications process, you’re likely to come across the term “community service” many times. In fact, you may be asked to write an essay about it. This post will cover the specifics of a community service essay and how to go about writing one, including what to cover and common mistakes to avoid. 

What is a Community Service Essay?

You may encounter the community service essay as you’re writing your supplemental essays for college. These are school-specific prompts that only go to the college that requests them, unlike the personal statement , which goes to every school you apply to. Not all schools require community service essays, but several do. It’s also a common requirement for scholarship applications, especially if it’s a school-specific merit scholarship. 

The community service essay is an essay that describes the initiatives you have taken outside of the classroom to benefit your community. In a 2018 survey of 264 admissions leaders across the US, 58% said that community service is a tie-breaker between students who are otherwise equally qualified. The community service essay offers you the opportunity to shine light on the work you have done to make an impact on the world and people around you, and is an additional way to help you stand out among other applicants. 

Approaching the Community Service Essay 

Understand the essay requirements  .

As with any essay, it’s important to first understand what is expected of your essay. For a start, elements to pay attention to include: 

  • Length requirements
  • Focus or subject of the essay prompt 
  • Organization of the essay 

Although all community service essays ultimately have the same purpose of having you describe your local service activities, they can come with different types of prompts. Below are three sample prompts. Note the differences in topic specificity, length requirements, and breadth of the prompt. 

From the CGCS – Bernard Harris Scholarship Program: 

Please describe a meaningful volunteer or community service experience, including what you learned from participating.

From the University of California Application :

What have you done to make your school or your community a better place? (350 words).

From the Equitable Excellence Scholarship:

Describe your outstanding achievement in depth and provide the specific planning, training, goals, and steps taken to make the accomplishment successful. Include details about your role and highlight leadership you provided. Your essay must be a minimum of 350 words but not more than 600 words.

Brainstorming for your community service essay 

Once you have an understanding of what is required of the specific you are to write, the next step is to brainstorm ideas for a specific topic. If you have various community-engaged service experiences under your belt, consider the following before you finalize your decision. 

The best topics:

Are substantial in length and scope. It’s better to cover a long-term commitment than a one-off afternoon at the food pantry or animal shelter. 

Are transformative or inspiring. Although community service is “others”-oriented, colleges are looking to learn more about you. The ideal community service essay topic should be an experience that changed or challenged your perspective, and was ultimately fulfilling. 

Illustrate personal qualities or passions that you want to highlight. Given the specific prompt, and taking the rest of your application into consideration, which personal interests do you want to highlight? Which activity illuminates the personal quality that you want to bring attention to? 

These are all elements to consider before you begin writing your essay. 

service oriented essay

Tips for Writing Your Community Service Essay 

1. include anecdotes.

Anecdotes are a great way to begin your essay, not only as a way to grab your reader’s attention, but by launching right into the experience of your service activity. You can start with a line about a particularly busy afternoon at the orphanage, or a morning cleaning up the streets after a storm, or the sense of accomplishment you felt when you watched a dog under your care at the animal shelter get adopted. 

2. Show, don’t tell 

We’re sure you’ve heard this axiom of general writing before, but it applies to college essays just as much as with any other piece of writing. Opt for evocative examples over plain explaining whenever possible. Take this sentence: “There was a lot of food waste at our school cafeteria.” It’s not nearly as powerful as this description: “I peered into the tall, gray trash cans to inspect the mountain of Styrofoam trays and discarded food. There were countless pizza crusts, globs of green beans, and unopened cartons of milk.” 

Anyone could write the first sentence, and it’s not a unique experience. In the second description, we’re shown the scene of the writer’s lunchroom. We get a peek into their perspective and life, which makes the writing more vivid and relatable. Aim to bring your reader into your world as much as possible.

3. Share your responsibilities and accomplishments.

The more tangible your community service activities feel to the reader, the more powerful your essay will be. Concretize your work by stating the basic details of what kind of work you did and what your duties involved, where it was based, when you began working, and the amount of time you spent working. 

Be sure to quantify your work and accomplishments when possible; it’s better to say your fundraiser yielded 125 books than “a large number” of books. It’s important to also elaborate on why the work you did matters. Why was it important? Did the books you collected or purchased after the fundraiser expand the library of the local orphanage that they already had, or did it offer the children easy access to books that wasn’t available previously? Be specific and detailed.  

4. Highlight what you learned and how you’ll use those lessons moving forward. 

Towards the end of your essay, you’ll want to share how you benefited from the community service work you did. This is an important part of the essay, because it shows how you are able to distill your experiences to applicable lessons in your own life. 

Think of this section in two potential parts: skills you learned, and personal development. Did you gain any hard skills, such as public speaking, poster design, or funds management? Then think about how you developed as an individual. Are you more empathetic or patient now? 

Things to Avoid in Your Community Service Essay 

1. don’t list out everything that happened..

You want to keep your essay well-structured and concise. This isn’t a rĂ©sumĂ©, or a play-by-play of the entire experience. Stick to the most telling details and anecdotes from your experience. 

2. Avoid using a pretentious or privileged tone.

Humility goes a long way, and entitlement can be smelled from afar. The purpose of this essay is not to paint yourself as a savior of any kind, but rather to show what’s important to you in your non-academic life, and how you approach solving real-world and interpersonal problems. 

3. Avoid clichés.

It may be tempting to quote famous people, but doing so can easily seem like a shortcut, plus it shows little of who you are. Try also to steer clear of trite and vague life lesson lines such as “I learned that people can be happy with so little,” or “I learned the importance of giving back.” Not only do they carry a tone of privilege, they are also sweeping general conclusions and don’t convey anything specific of what you learned. 

Community service is only a part of the college application process, which can be daunting and confusing. CollegeVine will help you navigate each step of the process, from building a college list, to calculating your chances at each school using our chancing engine. Create your free account and get started now !

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Associate Professor in Information Science at Cornell and rotating Program Officer in Cyber-Human Systems at NSF.

June 21, 2013, by dan cosley | june 21, 2013, tenure: writing and thinking about service.

tl/dr : You may need to write a service statement for tenure. It looks like effective ones use specific evidence to talk about your goals, accomplishments, and plans around service in your professional, university, and broader community.

In our last episode , we were talking about tenure in general, and since then much of my energy has gone into CSCW reviewing . Perhaps it’s only fitting, then, that one thing I’ve found I need for the tenure package is a “service statement” [0]. The official Cornell guidance  is delightfully terse: the dossier should include “statements from the candidate about his/her research, teaching, advising, service, and (if applicable) extension.” [1].

So I went off searching and asking for advice and examples [2]. Here I’ll give a few tidbits from that quest that are hopefully useful to other folks who are writing or thinking about service, followed by a mostly-reasonable draft of my own statement (comments welcome!).

Jon Kleinberg , who’s co-department chair and who handles tenure for information science, amplified a bit: “service: both in your research community outside Cornell — e.g. program committees and similar things — and also inside Cornell — things like serving on committees locally”. That was a nice, useful structuring suggestion, and I covered them separately (though  Phoebe Sengers  did a nice job of integrating both around a discussion of her overall service goals). I added a broader community aspect as well; in my case, I argued that this was primarily through software artifacts and public service via NSF reviews.

The Vet School has a little more guidance on what, specifically, to talk about: “The statement should document the quality and relevance of the clinical service and will include accomplishments, self-evaluation, steps taken to improve service, and future plans.” Combined with Jon’s advice, this basically set my overall structure.

The “steps taken to improve service” part of the vet school guidelines also reminded me that it might be useful to talk about specific training I’ve engaged in, whether it’s on the CV or not: a diversity workshop for hiring service; ed tech workshops for teaching; NSF funding workshops for research. Showing that you’re working to improve and setting yourself up for future success seems like an important goal, since part of promotion is about future potential.

That said, you also need to demonstrate current competence.  Tanzeem Choudhury ‘s service statement did a nice job of making specific claims around service impact backed up with specific examples from her service activities, which I largely emulated. Phoebe talked in detail about how she participated in and organized service activities [3] that served her goals and talked about tangible outcomes, which also felt strong.

There’s surely more to the story, but based on my poking at this I’ll call out the following bits as useful to think about.

  • It was handy to think about the different kinds of service: service to the professional community, the university (department, college, and university level), and the broader community.
  • You can tell the story around service using goals and rationales, the activities you’ve engaged in (both service itself and prep/training work), the accomplishments and outcomes that have come from them, and the plans you have going forward.
  • Finally, you should think about specific evidence you can marshal both to link the elements above and to demonstrate that you have significant “excellence and potential”, to use the words from the tenure policy. Thinking about  your noteworthy and distinctive goals, activities, accomplishments, and plans has value.

And, when I say “useful” or “has value”, I don’t just mean accomplishing an administrative busywork task. (a) It’s not just busywork: the tenure committee really does need you to help them think about this. (b) It’s probably worth spending a little time reflecting on what you do and why for service, how it shapes you and you shape it, and the cost-benefit story around it.

Hope this was useful, would be happy to get some comments on my statement, and have a good weekend.

— Dan

[0] Those of you waiting for a continuation of the CHI trip report … don’t hold your breath.  Now I understand why these are less common than they used to be; almost every thing I do is higher priority.

[1] Cornell is in part a public, land-grant university with an explicit public mission for several of its colleges; “extension” is a term often used to refer to those aspects.

[2] To be fair, Cornell does organize workshops that talk about tenure , tenure dossiers, and related topics in ways that have been useful. Your institution may have similar things; consider going earlier rather than later in your career, giving you more time to act on the advice.

[3] Phoebe also spent less time in the statement on standard kinds of conference-level reviewing and organization service, and more on activities  focused on her “ invisible college ” both within CHI and across disciplines. I don’t do as much of that kind of work, but now as I write this, it occurs to me that talking about my work and involvement with the Consortium for the Science of Sociotechnical Systems (CSST)  might be useful.  (Since I want to publish the draft more like now, I’m going to publish it with an “insert CSST story here” bit.)

==============

Service statement

In this statement I’ll talk about how I’ve addressed the service expectations for assistant professors, first covering service to my professional community, then to the university community, and finally to the community at large. In each case I’ll talk about my current activities and, to the extent I can predict them, future plans and goals.

Professional service

As an assistant professor, my primary service focus has been toward my professional community. This choice was based on both practical and moral considerations. From a practical point of view, one way junior researchers come onto the radar of more senior members of the community is through interacting with them as high-quality reviewers, program committee members, and conference organizers. It also is valuable for Cornell for its members to be seen as effective contributors to and leaders of their professional communities. From a moral point of view, service to the professional community is important and impactful. Submitting and publishing consumes resources and it is only right to give back through reviewing and organizing. Further, reviewers and organizers have real influence on the conversation of research in a discipline. Good service increases the quality of published research, which is both an academic and a societal good; those who serve also have their voices heard in shaping the directions and methods of a field.

Thus, I have invested major effort in professional service, as documented in my CV. I have a long history of reviewing for most of the major conferences and many of the journals related to my professional interests. Starting in 2009 I began serving on program committees, and have served on the CSCW and CHI committees a number of times. (I’ve also served on many other conference ‘program committees’, though junior members of these committees are mostly reviewers; these include RecSys, WWW, IUI, and UMAP). I also started in conference organization roles for relevant social computing conferences in 2009 including co-chair for videos, demos, and doctoral colloquiua. My work in these roles led to me being named the technical chair for WikiSym in 2012, and I was recently chosen to be the general co-chair for CSCW, a leading social computing conference, in 2015. This gradual escalation in responsibilities and roles gives evidence that I am seen as a valuable, important member of my professional community.

(Insert CSST paragraph here in next draft).

My plan here is largely to keep doing what I’m doing. I will need to be a little more strategic in reviewing (though I now use some review assignments to mentor PhD students in reviewing) and I will need to take breaks from outside service to support university work. But on balance I have done well here.

University service

For university service, I have focused primarily on service within my department, both to demonstrate my value as a department member and because department-level service is more aligned and appropriate with the experience and qualifications of assistant professors. Further, my department has been very good about limiting my university service duties so that I could focus on the professional service described above.

Still, I have done a number of things for Information Science, CIS, and Cornell. At the department level I’ve served in a number of committee roles, including the graduate admissions, curriculum, and faculty recruiting committee; serving in these roles has given me useful experience for leading these committees as an associate professor. I also organized a professionalization seminar series for early-career PhD students and managed the department colloquium for two years. At the college level, I’ve represented the department at college-level events including BOOM (Bits on Our Minds, our undergraduate research showcase) and Cornell Days (orientation for incoming undergrads); I also served on the committee overseeing the transition in computing facilities for the department. For the university, I’ve done several one-off committees and panels that leverage my expertise, including a successful panel on how academics can leverage social media, working with the social media hub portion of the Tech Campus initiative, reviewing for the Institute for Social Sciences grant program, and participating in the Cornell Moodle courseware pilot.

Here, I expect to take a much larger role as an associate professor, chairing committees for the department and participating in standing college and university-level committees. For the department, I’m looking forward to being the director of either undergrad or graduate studies once I return from sabbatical; either would give me a chance to turn some of my service energy directly toward students in a way necessary for the department and rewarding for both the students and me. At the university level, I am hoping to find committees that leverage my knowledge of social media, technology, and education; working with the development of academic technology and MOOCs would be a natural fit.

Service to the broader community

My main contributions to the broader community are through developing software artifacts as part of my research that are both themselves used and that have influenced other systems. SuggestBot, a Wikipedia tool that helps people find articles to edit that need work and that are related to their interests, has been in continuous use for six years and has made hundreds of thousands of recommendations to thousands of editors. Pensieve, which supports reminiscing and reflection by reminding people about meaningful content they have created in social media, still has an active user community after four years, and has influenced the design of related tools such as Timehop (whose senior engineer Jon Baxter was a student lead for Pensieve). RegulationRoom, an online community that encourages citizens to participate in federal rulemaking processes, has influenced a number of socially relevant regulations around air passenger rights, home mortgage consumer protection, and distracted driving. I also serve both the broader community and my professional community through regular reviewing for NSF proposals.

My main plan here is to continue to work on socially relevant projects. I’m building relationships with companies, particularly Google and Facebook, looking to define questions that have both research depth and potential impact on products used worldwide. My work with Amit Sharma on recommender systems designed for social networks and social interaction (rather than for individual consumption), with Victoria Schwanda on using social media platforms to deliver positive psychology interventions, with Bin Xu on leveraging social media data to support relationship-building both offline and online, and with Liz Murnane on better models and techniques for motivating people to volunteer and participate in activities for social good all have real potential value beyond the research community.

I am also considering two broader service activities that would have both social and personal benefit. One would be to invest some of my energy in the new tech campus. Building the infrastructure to help train a next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs would have lasting social benefit, while gaining more knowledge and experience in this area would make me a better advisor for students in the long term. The other broadening activity would be a rotation as an NSF program officer. With the current rate of hiring in information science and the progress of the set of students I am working with, a rotation there in two or three years might be excellent timing. Like the tech campus, this would produce both social good, through helping manage and shape national priorities around research, and personal/professional good, through a better understanding of the funding landscape and through interacting with reviewers and other NSF officers.

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Social Awareness is a person's ability to consider the perspectives of other individuals, groups or communities and apply that understanding in their interactions. It is composed by: empathy, organizational awareness and service orientation.

Service orientation is the last missing piece for building social awareness . It is described by Daniel Goleman as “ the ability to recognize and meet customer’s needs ”. However, in this article I will explore a broader perspective of the concept, and not just to focus on the undoubted importance of serving our clients and customers.

Service-oriented people focus on anticipating, recognizing and meeting peoples’ needs no matter if they are clients or not. They make themselves available for others and care about them. Therefore, it is easy to conclude that they are more likely to feel empathy and compassion for individuals around them.

People with this emotional skill can adapt or change situations so that they can provide an opportunity to support others in their workplace. Furthermore, some questions come to our minds when reflecting about service orientation: How much do you assist your co-workers? Are you eager to help others to succeed or eager to reach your own success? How much are you recognized for this service ability?

In the everyday world around us, services are and have been a commonplace for our society. Any person carrying out a distinct task in support of others is providing a service. Any group of individuals collectively performing a task which focuses on the collective good, also demonstrates a service delivery.

Talent Management: A Guide for HR

service oriented essay

Talent management continues to be one of the top focuses for HR departments all over the world. Why? It is a commitment from an organization to recruit, hire, retain, and develop employees. I n our guide, the HR Exchange Network explores the topic in more detail, looks the current state of affairs, strategies, why you should invest in talent management and provides a forecast into what to expect in the coming years.

READ:  Building Self-Confidence Through Self-Awareness

There are people who claim that the future is collective as we do not have a “Planet B”. In this perspective, a serve-first mindset and the service orientation skill are crucial to transform and develop a more inclusive environment.

Serve-first or collaborative mindset is about making situations a win-win for all participants. A leader with this attitude goes beyond of simply distributing tasks to their employees, and instead they think: “How can I help them to succeed?”

It is common sense that organizations hire professionals based on their mindsets (attitudes) which are important to develop its businesses and invest on the development of new skills later. In this regard, have you questioned yourself regarding the mindset you bring to work or what you need to develop or change in the future?

In the book “ Leaders Eat Last ” , Simon Sinek explains that leaders put their own interests aside; they go first into danger and they face the unknown to protect their people. In his view, this is what means to be a leader. Likewise, there is a clear link between his definition and the servant leadership concept developed by Robert K. Greenleaf .

Servant Leadership

The other aspect of service orientation is relationship management . This means you can use yours and others' emotions to build strong, effective and lifelong relationships with people around you.

Servant leadership is not a leadership style or methodology. It is a mindset that complements other leadership types as the democratic and transformational ones. As a servant leader, you put your employees first, focusing on their needs before considering your own.

  • K. Greenleaf said in his essay “ The Servant as Leader ” that "t he servant-leader is servant first. " What we can conclude is that the “desire to serve” is a key distinguishing characteristic of a servant-leader. However, it is not about being servile, it is about identifying and meeting the needs of co-workers, clients and communities.

Nevertheless, it is relevant to mention that servant leadership mindset is problematic in hierarchical and autocratic cultures. In these organizations, it is expected that managers and leaders take all the decisions and in this sense, servant leaders may fight to earn respect.

Service Orientation Skill Development

Service orientation is not an isolated skill. To develop this ability and the serve-first mindset you will need, as a basis, a set of other skills listed below:

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  • Empathy . The ability of understanding another person's view and feelings. In each interaction you have with others, it is a chance to learn new ways of thinking, to share feelings and to make a difference by contributing and helping others grow.
  • Adaptability . The ability to change quickly and respond to new ways of working. People are different and they have different needs, which will require from you different approaches. You should be able to handle surprises, expectations and adapt accordingly.
  • Communication . Ensure you convey a clear message to all. Use positive language, stay cheerful no matter what and never end a conversation without closing the subject.
  • Trustworthiness . The ability to lead ethically or “walk the talk”. Refers to a concrete action, taking risks on the behavior of the other party. Focus on building an integrity and values-based organization.
  • Knowledge . Stay informed enough to respond and know where to turn if the questions become too technical for you to answer. Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know” either, people around you will appreciate your honesty.

Service Orientation begins with a natural feeling and choice to serve others, because good leaders understand the importance of their people and that they should come first. As R. K. Greenleaf once said….

“ Servant leadership begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then, conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead .”

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Center for Teaching

  • What is Service Learning or Community Engagement?
Bandy, J. (2011). What is Service Learning or Community Engagement?. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/teaching-through-community-engagement/.

service oriented essay

  • Benefits of Community Engagement

Models of Community Engagement Teaching

Ways to integrate community engagement into an existing course.

Community engagement pedagogies, often called “service learning,” are ones that combine learning goals and community service in ways that can enhance both student growth and the common good.  In the words of the National Service Learning Clearinghouse , it is “a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities.”  Or, to quote Vanderbilt University’s Janet S. Eyler (winner of the 2003 Thomas Ehrlich Faculty Award for Service Learning) and Dwight E. Giles, Jr., it is

“a form of experiential education where learning occurs through a cycle of action and reflection as students. . . seek to achieve real objectives for the community and deeper understanding and skills for themselves. In the process, students link personal and social development with academic and cognitive development. . . experience enhances understanding; understanding leads to more effective action.”

Typically, community engagement is incorporated into a course or series of courses by way of a project that has both learning and community action goals.  This project is designed via collaboration between faculty and community partners, such as non-governmental organizations or government agencies.  The project asks students to apply course content to community-based activities.  This gives students experiential opportunities to learn in real world contexts and develop skills of community engagement, while affording community partners opportunities to address significant needs. Vanderbilt University’s Sharon Shields has argued that service learning is “one of the most significant teaching methodologies gaining momentum on many campuses.” Indeed, when done well, teaching through community engagement benefits students, faculty, communities, and institutions of higher education. Below are some of the benefits that education researchers and practitioners have associated with community engaged teaching.

Student Benefits of Community Engagement

Learning outcomes.

  • Positive impact on students’ academic learning
  • Improves students’ ability to apply what they have learned in “the real world”
  • Positive impact on academic outcomes such as demonstrated complexity of understanding, problem analysis, problem-solving, critical thinking, and cognitive development
  • Improved ability to understand complexity and ambiguity

Personal Outcomes

  • Greater sense of personal efficacy, personal identity, spiritual growth, and moral development
  • Greater interpersonal development, particularly the ability to work well with others, and build leadership and communication skills

Social Outcomes

  • Reduced stereotypes and greater inter-cultural understanding
  • Improved social responsibility and citizenship skills
  • Greater involvement in community service after graduation

Career Development

  • Connections with professionals and community members for learning and career opportunities
  • Greater academic learning, leadership skills, and personal efficacy can lead to greater opportunity

Relationship with the Institution

  • Stronger relationships with faculty
  • Greater satisfaction with college
  • Improved graduation rates

Faculty Benefits of Community Engagement

  • Satisfaction with the quality of student learning
  • New avenues for research and publication via new relationships between faculty and community
  • Providing networking opportunities with engaged faculty in other disciplines or institutions
  • A stronger commitment to one’s research

College and University Benefits of Community Engagement

  • Improved institutional commitment to the curriculum
  • Improved student retention
  • Enhanced community relations

Community Benefits of Community Engagement

  • Satisfaction with student participation
  • Valuable human resources needed to achieve community goals
  • New energy, enthusiasm and perspectives applied to community work
  • Enhanced community-university relations

Discipline-Based

Discipline-based model.

In this model, students are expected to have a presence in the community throughout the semester and reflect on their experiences regularly.  In these reflections, they use course content as a basis for their analysis and understanding of the key theoretical, methodological and applied issues at hand.

Problem-Based

Problem-based model.

Students relate to the community much as “consultants” working for a “client.” Students work with community members to understand a particular community problem or need.  This model presumes that the students have or will develop capacities with which to help communities solve a problem.  For example: architecture students might design a park; business students might develop a web site; botany students might identify non-native plants and suggest eradication methods.

Capstone Course

Capstone course model.

These courses are generally designed for majors and minors in a given discipline and are offered almost exclusively to students in their final year. Capstone courses ask students to draw upon the knowledge they have obtained throughout their course work and combine it with relevant service work in the community. The goal of capstone courses is usually either exploring a new topic or synthesizing students’ understanding of their discipline.

Service Internship

Service internship model.

This approach asks students to work as many as 10 to 20 hours a week in a community setting. As in traditional internships, students are charged with producing a body of work that is of value to the community or site. However, unlike traditional internships, service internships have on-going faculty-guided reflection to challenge the students to analyze their new experiences using discipline-based theories.  Service internships focus on reciprocity: the idea that the community and the student benefit equally from the experience.

Undergrad Community-Based Action Research

Action research model.

Community-based action research is similar to an independent study option for the student who is highly experienced in community work.  This approach can be effective with small classes or groups of students.  In this model, students work closely with faculty members to learn research methodology while serving as advocates for communities.  This model assumes that students are or can be trained to be competent in time management and can negotiate diverse communities.

Directed Study Extra Credit

Directed study additional/extra credit model.

Students can register for up to three additional/extra credits in a course by making special arrangements with the instructor to complete an added community-based project.  The course instructor serves as the advisor for the directed study option.  Such arrangements require departmental approval and formal student registration.

There are many ways to integrate community engagement into an existing course, depending on the learning goals, the size of the class, the academic preparation of the students, and the community partnership or project type. Below are some general tips to consider as you begin:

  • One-time group service projects: Some course objectives can be met when the entire class is involved in a one-time service project. Arrangements for service projects can be made prior to the semester and included in the syllabus. This model affords the opportunity for faculty and peer interaction because a common service experience is shared. One-time projects have different learning outcomes than ongoing service activities.
  • Option within a course: Many faculty begin community engagement with a pilot project. In this design, students have the option to become involved in the community-based project.  A portion of the normal coursework is substituted by the community-based component.  For example, a traditional research paper or group project can be replaced with an experiential research paper or personal journal that documents learning from the service experience.
  • Required within a course: In this case, all students are involved in service as an integrated aspect of the course. This expectation must be clearly stated at the first class meeting, on the syllabus, with a clear rationale provided to students as to why the service component is required. Exceptions can be arranged on an individual basis or students can transfer to another class. If all students are involved in service, it is easier to design coursework (i.e., class discussions, writing assignments, exam questions) that integrates the service experience with course objectives. Class sessions can involve agency personnel and site visits. Faculty report that it is easier to build community partnerships if a consistent number of students are involved each semester.
  • Action research projects: This type of class involves students in research within the community. The results of the research are communicated to the agency so that it can be used to address community needs. Action research and participatory action research take a significant amount of time to build relationships of trust in the community and identify common research agendas; however, community research projects can support the ongoing research of faculty. Extending this type of research beyond the confines of a semester may be best for all involved.
  • Disciplinary capstone projects: Community engagement is an excellent way to build upon students’ cumulative knowledge in a specific discipline and to demonstrate the integration of that knowledge with real life issues. Upper class students can explore ways their disciplinary expertise and competencies translate into addressing community needs. Other community-based classes within the department can prepare the student for this more extensive community-based class.
  • Multiple course projects :  Community engagement projects with one or more partners may span different courses in the same semester or multiple courses over a year or longer.  These projects must be broad enough to meet the learning goals of multiple courses over time, and because of this they may have a cumulative impact on both student learning and community development that is robust.  Such projects may be particularly suited to course clusters or learning communities within or across disciplines, or course sequences, say, within a major, that build student capacity towards advanced learning and community action goals.

Other CFT Guides About Community Engagement Pedagogies

  • A Word on Nomenclature
  • Best Practices in Community Engaged Teaching
  • Community Engaged Teaching Step by Step
  • Challenges and Opportunities of Community Engaged Teaching
  • Additional Resources

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Essay on Service: A Comprehensive Guide

essay on service

In the realm of academic writing, an essay on service centered on the theme of service holds a distinct power to inspire, connect, and engage readers. These essays go beyond the conventional academic structure, as they delve into personal experiences, reflections, and narratives that highlight the essence of service. Whether you’re exploring the psychology of service narratives, choosing a topic for your service essay, or navigating the intricacies of different genres, this comprehensive guide will equip you with the tools to master the art of crafting impactful service essays. Let’s embark on a journey to unleash your creativity and connect with your readers through the compelling language of service.

1. Unveiling Service Narratives: Essay Writing Insights:

   1.1. crafting service-focused academic essays:.

Crafting essays that center on service involves more than just words; it’s about weaving a tapestry of experiences that resonate with readers on a personal level. These essays act as vehicles of communication, conveying not only information but also emotions and ideals.

   1.2. Exploring Essays Centered on Service:

Delving into the world of service-themed essays offers a unique opportunity to explore the ways in which individuals contribute to their communities and make a meaningful impact. These essays shed light on the personal growth and interconnectedness that arise from acts of service

   1.3. Service Oriented Essay Writing Strategies:

Service-oriented essay writing is an art that requires a delicate balance of empathy, persuasion, and authenticity. By adopting strategies that allow you to convey service ideals effectively, you can create narratives that resonate with readers and inspire positive action.

   1.4. Incorporating Service Themes in Essays:

At the heart of service-themed essays lies the integration of service themes into every aspect of your writing. This involves not only discussing service but also incorporating its principles and values into the structure, tone, and message of your essay.

2. Elevate Your Essays: The Power of Service Themes:

   2.1. effective service driven essay composition:.

Crafting essays that drive home the significance of service requires a deep understanding of your audience and the emotions that resonate with them. Effective service-driven essay composition involves evoking empathy and compelling readers to take action.

   2.2. Writing Service Based Essays with Impact:

Service-based essays are a platform for conveying personal experiences that carry universal significance. By focusing on impactful anecdotes and thought-provoking reflections, you can create essays that leave a lasting impression.

   2.3. Essay Writing that Highlights Service:

Essay writing that highlights service goes beyond mere description; it’s about creating narratives that illuminate the transformative power of service experiences. These essays inspire readers to think beyond themselves and consider their roles within their communities.

   2.4. Conveying Service Ideals through Essays:

At the core of service-themed essays is the aspiration to convey service ideals in a way that resonates deeply with readers. By employing persuasive language and relatable examples, you can inspire others to embrace the value of service in their lives.

3. Crafting Impactful Service Essays: A Comprehensive Guide:

   3.1. mastering service related essay crafting:.

Mastering the art of crafting service-related essays involves honing your ability to infuse personal experiences with broader service concepts. This mastery enables you to create narratives that are both relatable and impactful.

   3.2. The Art of Essay Writing About Service:

Essay writing about service is not just about presenting facts; it’s an opportunity to engage readers emotionally and intellectually. By tapping into your own experiences and weaving them into a broader narrative, you can create essays that resonate deeply.

   3.3. How Do You Talk About Service in an Essay?

Talking about service in an essay involves striking a balance between personal anecdotes and a broader exploration of service themes. It’s about creating a narrative that is both relatable and enlightening, encouraging readers to consider their own roles in serving their communities.

   3.4. What Are the Different Types of Service Essays?

Service essays come in various forms, each with its own unique approach and purpose. Exploring reflective, persuasive, and informative service essays allows you to tailor your writing to different contexts and objectives.

4. Beyond Basics: Mastering Service Centric Essay Composition:

   4.1. how do i choose a topic for a service essay.

Choosing a topic for a service essay involves identifying experiences that have deeply impacted you and that align with the values of service. It’s about selecting stories that evoke empathy and inspire action.

   4.2. What Are the Steps Involved in Writing an Essay on Service?

Writing an essay on service requires a systematic approach that involves brainstorming, researching, outlining, drafting, revising, and polishing. Each step contributes to the creation of a cohesive and impactful narrative.

   4.3. What Is the Purpose of Writing an Essay on Service?

The purpose of writing an essay on service extends beyond academic requirements; it’s about sharing stories that have the potential to change perspectives, inspire empathy, and drive positive change in readers.

   4.4. What Are Some Common Mistakes to Avoid in Service Essays?

While writing service essays, it’s important to avoid pitfalls such as overgeneralization, lack of authenticity, and neglecting the emotional aspects of the narrative. These common mistakes can hinder the impact of your essay.

4.5. What does service mean to your essay?

The context of writing essays on service prompts an exploration into one’s personal understanding and perspective on the concept of service. Crafting a short essay on service allows individuals to reflect on their own experiences, values, and beliefs related to helping others and contributing to the well-being of communities. It encourages introspection and thoughtful analysis, encouraging writers to delve into instances where they have offered assistance, demonstrated kindness, or made a positive impact on others’ lives. In composing such an essay, the key lies in producing an original essay that not only defines service but also showcases the author’s unique viewpoint and insights, creating a genuine and compelling narrative that resonates with readers.

5. Navigating Service Essay Genres: A Deep Dive:

   5.1. exploring the reflective service essay genre:.

Reflective service essays provide a platform for introspection and personal growth. By reflecting on your own service experiences, you can offer valuable insights that resonate with readers on a deeper level.

   5.2. Analyzing Persuasive Customer Service Essays:

Persuasive customer service essays aim to convince readers of the importance of service. By presenting compelling arguments and real-life examples, you can inspire readers to adopt service-oriented mindsets.

   5.3. Delving into Personal Narratives of Service:

Personal narratives of service allow you to share your journey of engaging with your community. These narratives offer authenticity and relatability, inspiring readers to reflect on their own potential for positive impact.

6. From Idea to Excellence: Writing Memorable Service Essays:

   6.1. cultivating compelling ideas for service essays:.

Cultivating ideas for service essays involves drawing inspiration from personal experiences, observations, and interactions. These ideas form the foundation for narratives that captivate and engage readers.

   6.2. Structuring Your Service Essay for Impact:

A well-structured service essay enhances reader comprehension and engagement. By organizing your essay with clear introductions, body paragraphs, and conclusions, you guide readers through a coherent narrative.

   6.3. Crafting Captivating Introductions and Conclusions:

Captivating introductions and conclusions set the tone for your service essay. A compelling introduction grabs readers’ attention, while a resonant conclusion leaves them with a lasting message of service and connection.

   6.4. Weaving Personal Experiences into the Narrative:

Weaving personal experiences into the narrative adds authenticity and relatability to your service essay. By sharing genuine moments of service and reflection, you create a powerful emotional connection with readers.

7. Service Reflections in Essays: Strategies for Success:

   7.1. evoking empathy through service stories:.

Evoking empathy through service stories involves sharing experiences that stir reader’s emotions and encourage them to step into the shoes of those being served. This emotional connection fosters a deeper understanding of service ideals.

   7.2. Balancing Personal Growth and Community Impact:

Balancing personal growth and community impact in service reflections showcases the reciprocal nature of service. Sharing how service experiences have transformed you can inspire readers to embark on their own journeys of growth and contribution.

   7.3. Using Reflection to Drive Home the Importance of Service:

Reflection serves as a powerful tool to drive home the importance of service. By analyzing your experiences and considering their implications, you demonstrate the lasting impact that service can have on individuals and communities.

8. Unleash Creativity: Innovative Approaches to Service Essays:

   8.1. incorporating multimedia elements in service essays:.

Incorporating multimedia elements such as images, videos, or infographics can enhance the visual appeal of your service essays. These elements provide additional layers of engagement and understanding.

   8.2. Experimental Formats: Service Essays Beyond the Traditional:

Exploring experimental formats, such as interactive narratives or multimedia presentations, pushes the boundaries of traditional essay writing. These formats offer new ways to convey service stories and engage readers.

   8.3. The Role of Metaphors and Symbolism in Service Writing:

Metaphors and symbolism add depth and nuance to service writing. By using figurative language, you can create connections between abstract service concepts and tangible experiences, making your essays more resonant.

9. The Psychology of Service Essays: Persuasion and Connection:

   9.1. understanding the psychological impact of service narratives:.

Service narratives have a profound psychological impact on readers. They evoke emotions, prompt introspection, and inspire readers to consider their own roles in making a positive impact.

   9.2. Using Storytelling Techniques for Emotional Resonance:

Storytelling techniques, such as anecdotes and narratives, elicit emotional resonance in service essays. These techniques create connections between readers and the experiences shared, fostering empathy and understanding.

   9.3. Creating Relatable Characters in Service-Based Essays:

Creating relatable characters in service-based essays allows readers to connect with the individuals being served. By humanizing the experiences, you provide readers with a tangible representation of the service’s transformative effects.

10. Acing Service-Related Academic Writing: Proven Techniques:

   10.1. leveraging academic research in service essays:.

Incorporating academic research in service essays lends credibility to your arguments and adds depth to your narratives. Well-researched essays demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of service concepts.

   10.2. Properly Citing Sources While Maintaining a Service Focus:

Properly citing sources ensures the integrity of your service essays. By following citation guidelines and integrating sources seamlessly, you uphold academic standards while prioritizing the service narrative.

  10.3. Addressing Counterarguments with Respect to Service Ideas:

Addressing counterarguments in service essays demonstrates critical thinking and a willingness to engage with diverse perspectives. By respectfully addressing opposing viewpoints, you strengthen your own arguments.

11. Connecting with Readers: Emotionally Resonant Service Essays:

   11.1. eliciting empathy and compassion through service narratives:.

Eliciting empathy and compassion through service narratives involves sharing stories that touch readers’ hearts. By highlighting the impact of service on individuals, you create an emotional connection that encourages action.

   11.2. Inspiring Action Through Emotional Engagement:

Inspiring action through emotional engagement requires appealing to readers’ desires to make a positive impact. By emphasizing the potential for change and growth, you motivate readers to take steps toward service-oriented actions.

   11.3. Balancing Emotional Appeal with Logical Persuasion:

Balancing emotional appeal with logical persuasion in service essays creates a well-rounded argument. By providing both emotional anecdotes and logical reasoning, you appeal to readers’ hearts and minds.

12. Decoding Grading Rubrics: Excelling in Service Essay Evaluation:

   12.1. understanding how service themes are evaluated:.

Understanding how service themes are evaluated enables you to tailor your essays to meet specific criteria. By aligning your writing with grading rubrics, you increase the likelihood of achieving high marks.

   12.2. Aligning Content with Grading Criteria:

Aligning content with grading criteria involves ensuring that your service essays address the key components outlined in rubrics. This alignment demonstrates a clear understanding of the assignment’s objectives.

   12.3. Showcasing Depth and Critical Thinking in Service Essays:

Showcasing depth and critical thinking in service essays involves analyzing service concepts from multiple angles. By demonstrating a nuanced understanding of the subject matter, you convey a higher level of expertise.

13. Amplify Your Voice: Unique Angles in Service Essay Topics:

   13.1. exploring niche service related essay topics:.

Exploring niche service-related essay topics allows you to address specific aspects of service that resonate with you. These topics provide opportunities to delve deeper into less-explored dimensions of service narratives.

   13.2. Unconventional Perspectives on Service and Community:

Unconventional perspectives on service and community challenge traditional viewpoints and spark new conversations. By presenting fresh angles, you encourage readers to consider innovative approaches to service.

   13.3. Finding Your Distinctive Voice Within Service Discourse:

Finding your distinctive voice within service discourse sets your essays apart. By infusing your unique experiences, opinions, and reflections, you contribute to the richness of the service narrative landscape.

14. Step by Step: Crafting an A-Grade Service Essay:

   14.1. prewriting: brainstorming and topic selection:.

Prewriting involves brainstorming ideas, selecting a compelling topic, and defining the scope of your service essay. This foundational step lays the groundwork for a well-structured and engaging narrative.

   14.2. Drafting: Structuring and Organizing Your Essay:

Drafting your service essay involves creating an outline, organizing content logically, and ensuring a coherent flow of ideas. This step-by-step process guides you in presenting your narrative effectively.

   14.3. Editing and Revising: Polishing Your Service Narrative:

Editing and revising elevate your service narrative by refining language, improving clarity, and eliminating errors. These critical steps ensure that your essay communicates your message with precision.

   14.4. Final Touches: Proofreading and Finalizing Your Essay:

The final touches involve proofreading your service essay for grammar, punctuation, and formatting. By meticulously reviewing your work, you ensure that your essay is polished and ready for presentation.

15. Captivating Beginnings: Hooking Readers in Service Essays:

   15.1. the importance of a compelling essay introduction:.

The essay introduction sets the tone for your service narrative. A compelling introduction captivates readers and invites them to embark on a journey of exploration and reflection.

   15.2. Using Anecdotes, Quotes, and Questions to Engage Readers:

Anecdotes, quotes, and questions are powerful tools for engaging readers from the outset. These elements spark curiosity, stimulate thought, and establish a connection between your narrative and readers’ experiences.

   15.3. Establishing the Relevance of Service from the Start:

Establishing the relevance of service from the start demonstrates the significance of your essay’s theme. By providing context and highlighting the universal importance of service, you capture readers’ attention.

16. Distinctive Discourse: Standing Out in Service Essay Discourse:

   16.1 developing a unique writing style for service essays:.

Developing a unique writing style distinguishes your service essays from others. Infuse your essays with your personal voice while maintaining clarity and professionalism.

   16.2 Balancing Formal Language with Personal Expression:

Balancing formal language with personal expression is key to creating essays that are both informative and engaging. Strike a balance between academic rigor and emotional resonance.

   16.3 Leveraging Literary Devices to Enhance Your Narrative:

Leveraging literary devices such as metaphors, similes, and symbolism enriches your service narrative. These devices add depth, imagery, and layers of meaning to your writing.

17. Authenticity Matters: Personal Voice in Service Essays:

   17.1 Infusing Your Personal Experiences and Perspectives:

Infusing your personal experiences and perspectives into service essays adds authenticity and relatability. By sharing your journey, you foster a genuine connection with readers.

   17.2 Striking a Balance Between Authenticity and Professionalism:

Striking a balance between authenticity and professionalism ensures that your service essays are both heartfelt and well-structured. Maintain a tone that reflects your personal voice while adhering to academic standards.

   17.3 The Power of Vulnerability in Service-Centered Writing:

Embracing vulnerability in service-centered writing invites readers into your experiences and reflections. This honesty fosters a deeper connection and encourages readers to reflect on their own journeys.

18. Pitfalls to Triumphs: Navigating Challenges in Service Essays:

   18.1 addressing potential ethical concerns in service writing:.

Addressing potential ethical concerns in service writing demonstrates your commitment to responsible storytelling. Approach sensitive topics with respect and consideration for all parties involved.

18.2 Overcoming Writer’s Block When Tackling Service Themes:

Overcoming writer’s block requires strategies that rejuvenate your creativity. Engage in activities that inspire new ideas, such as immersing yourself in service experiences or seeking inspiration from diverse sources.

   18.3 Transforming Setbacks into Valuable Lessons in Service Narratives:

Transforming setbacks into valuable lessons in service narratives showcases resilience and growth. By sharing how challenges have shaped your understanding of service, you inspire readers to view obstacles as opportunities.

Conclusion:

As we conclude this journey through the world of writing essays on service, it’s evident that these narratives possess a unique ability to resonate with readers on both intellectual and emotional levels. The art of crafting service essays goes beyond technique; it’s about fostering connections, inspiring action, and embodying the ideals of service in every word you write. By embracing the strategies, insights, and approaches outlined in this guide, you are equipped to create essays that not only showcase your expertise but also evoke empathy, change perspectives, and ignite positive change. Let the language of service be your instrument for transformation and empowerment, as you continue to make your mark in the world of academic writing and beyond.

Q1. What is a service essay?

A service essay is a form of academic writing that delves into personal experiences, reflections, and narratives related to the theme of service. Unlike conventional essays, these compositions go beyond presenting information; they evoke emotions, ideals, and connections with readers. Service essays discuss instances of helping others, contributing to communities, and making a positive impact. They explore the transformative power of service, showcasing how engagement with others can lead to personal growth, interconnectedness, and positive change.

Q2. How do you talk about service in an essay?

When discussing service in an essay, it’s essential to strike a balance between personal anecdotes and broader service themes. Incorporate real-life examples to illustrate your points and evoke empathy. Consider discussing the significance of service in fostering connections and personal development. Utilize persuasive language to inspire readers to consider their own roles in serving their communities. By weaving your experiences into a larger narrative, you can create an essay that is both relatable and enlightening.

Q3. What are the different types of service essays?

There are several types of service essays, each with its unique approach and purpose. Reflective service essays focus on personal growth and transformation resulting from service experiences. Persuasive service essays aim to convince readers of the importance of service through compelling arguments. Informative service essays provide factual information about specific service-related topics. Personal narratives of service allow writers to share their journeys of engaging with communities, offering authenticity and relatability.

Q4. How do I choose a topic for a service essay?

Choosing a topic for a service essay involves identifying experiences that have deeply impacted you and aligned with the values of service. Select stories that evoke empathy and reflect on moments where you’ve offered assistance or made a positive impact. Consider topics that resonate with your personal experiences and perspectives, and choose those that have the potential to inspire positive change or foster understanding.

Q5. What are the steps involved in writing an essay on service?

Writing an essay on service involves several key steps: brainstorming ideas, selecting a compelling topic, conducting research if needed, outlining the essay’s structure, drafting content, revising and editing for clarity and coherence, and finally, proofreading for grammar and formatting. Each step contributes to creating a well-organized, impactful, and engaging narrative about service.

Q6. What are the grading criteria for service essays?

Grading criteria for service essays often focus on alignment with the essay’s objectives, depth of analysis, clarity of expression, coherence and organization, integration of personal experiences with broader service themes, and adherence to academic standards such as proper citation. Demonstrating a clear understanding of service concepts, engaging readers emotionally and intellectually, and providing well-reasoned arguments are also key aspects that evaluators might consider.

Q7. What is the purpose of writing an essay on service?

The purpose of writing an essay on service extends beyond fulfilling academic requirements. It’s about sharing stories that have the potential to change perspectives, inspire empathy, and drive positive change in readers. These essays encourage readers to reflect on their roles within their communities, consider the impact of their actions, and cultivate a service-oriented mindset that contributes to the betterment of society.

Q8. What are some common mistakes to avoid in in-service essays?

In service essays, it’s important to avoid common pitfalls such as overgeneralization, lack of authenticity, neglecting emotional aspects, and failing to consider counterarguments. Overgeneralization can oversimplify complex topics, while authenticity lends credibility to your narrative. Ignoring emotional aspects can make your essay dry, and not addressing counterarguments may weaken your stance. Strive for a balanced, well-reasoned, and emotionally resonant narrative that engages readers effectively.

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57 Community Service Essay Topics and Examples

🏆 best titles about community service, 👍 simple & easy research titles about community, 🎓 most interesting community topics to write about.

  • Most Satisfying Experience Related to Community Service I will serve as a role model for other people and they, following my example, will also get committed to the temple.
  • Concept of the Community Services in Modern Society Community services are defined as the services which are performed for the benefit of the society on volunteering basis. The advantages of the community services cannot be questioned, still, making such service mandatory for graduation […]
  • Community Service Experience: Homeless Shelter The shelter also organizes outreach and humanitarian work during the day to ensure that homeless people in the community know about the shelter and the services it provides.
  • Community Service as a Form of Correction Of these alternatives, community service has been one of the most employed and therefore opened a room for debates with the proponents feeling that the option is a remedy to all the prison problems while […]
  • Community service should be required by most citizens of a country One of the reasons is because President Clinton has been explaining the importance of volunteering to the community by the American students and the public.
  • S.H.A.P.E. Community Service and Programs The organization emphasizes unity, self-determination, creativity, faith, and teamwork as the basis of its work.S.H.A.P.E.programs target young and elderly generations and aim to improve the quality of life of particular age category individuals and the […]
  • Dayton Children’s Hospital and Community Service Dayton Children’s is committed to improve quality of life of people living in the community. This report provides more detailed information on the organization’s activities and monetary amounts of community benefit.
  • Mondawmin Community Service Delivery Plan Through the service delivery plan, the relevant authorities in the region will put in place the relevant measures for reducing or eliminating the above predicament in the region.
  • Addressing the Impacts of Undergraduates’ Engagement in Community Service on Stakeholders It is important to note that as much as the community and the individual stands to benefit from community service, there are various challenges facing the provision of this service in a given community.
  • Illuminate Diabetes Event Design Finally, after these special performances, there will be distribution of fliers with information on diabetes and encouragement to get tested for diabetes and thus reach the climax of the event.
  • Hampton-Newport News Community Services Board The Hampton-Newport Community Services Board offers a broad range of mental well-being and drug abuse services and care for people with mental and developmental disorders. The agency works together with certified psychoanalysts and psychologists in […]
  • Volunteering in Leisure Sector The review shows that individuals are motivated due to the benefits that come with volunteering in the sector and the nature of the activity.
  • Volunteering for Horizon House: Homeless Neighbours’ Motivation to Find Jobs To understand and analyze the role of the center in changing the homeless neighbours’ life for better, it is appropriate to focus on the center’s assistance in employing neighbours and developing their job skills with […]
  • Conceptualization of the Aspect of Community Service As part of expressive the Jewish values, the aspect of creativity and innovativeness help to inspire the inner self to remain observant, responsible, and caring to the needs of neighbors and the society at large.
  • Community Service: Mandatory or Voluntary? Engaging in community service not only helps in transforming the behavior of young people but it is also helpful to adults.
  • The Achievements of Peaceful Protest During the Civil Rights Movement
  • The War On Drugs And The Civil Rights Movement
  • The Long Term Effects of the Civil Rights Movement
  • African Americans And Religion During The Civil Rights Movement
  • The History of the Civil Rights Movement in the United Stats and Its Impact on African Americans
  • Analyzing the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War
  • The Impact Of Rock ‘n’ Roll On The Civil Rights Movement
  • The Importance and Impact of the Civil Rights Movement to the Public Policy
  • Women in the Civil Rights Movement
  • A History of the Civil Rights Movement and Feminist Movement in the United States
  • To What Extent Can the 1950’s Be Viewed as a Great Success for the Civil Rights Movement
  • The Historical Accuracy of the Portrayal of the Civil Rights Movement in Selma, a Drama Film by Ava DuVernay
  • A Look at Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the Role of Martin Luther
  • The Historiography Of Womens Role And Visibility In The Civil Rights Movement
  • The Relationship of Southern Jews to Blacks and the Civil Rights Movement
  • The Contradicting Outcome of the Civil Rights Movement in America
  • The Montgomery Bus Boycott And The Civil Rights Movement
  • The Role Of Police During The Civil Rights Movement
  • The Role Of The Supreme Court In The Civil Rights Movement
  • The True Face of The Civil Rights Movement
  • The Stages of the Progressive Reform in the Civil Rights Movement
  • U.S. Democracy and the Civil Rights Movement
  • Theatre in the Era of the Civil Rights Movement
  • The Importance of Students During The Civil Rights Movement
  • The Relationship between Activism and Federal Government during the Civil Rights Movement
  • Violent and Non-violent Methods of Protests Embraced by African American in the Civil Rights Movement
  • The Role and Importance of the Grassroot Organizers on the Civil Rights Movement
  • The Fight For Aid From The Civil Rights Movement
  • The Success of The Civil Rights Movement in the 1950’s
  • The Laws in the Reconstruction Era and the Civil Rights Movement
  • The New York Times And The Civil Rights Movement
  • White Resistance to the Civil Rights Movement
  • The Role of Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement
  • Understanding the Civil Rights Movement: America vs. Australia
  • Successes And Failures Of Civil Rights Movement
  • The Civil Rights Movement & the Black Middle Class
  • The Foundation of the Niagara Movement and Its Influence on the Civil Rights Movement in America
  • To What Extent Was Grass Roots Activism a Significant Reason to Why the Civil Rights Movement Grew in the 1950s and 1960s
  • The History of the Civil Rights Movement, National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
  • The Value of Studying the Civil Rights Movement
  • The Effect of Society on the World of Doubt and the Effects of the Civil Rights Movement
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  • Red Cross Titles
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  • Wellness Essay Topics
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Service Orientation - The Ten Principals of Servant Leadership

Robert K. Greenleaf coined the term “servant leadership” in an essay he first published in 1970, saying:

“The servant-leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions. The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. The leader who is a servant first ensures that other people’s highest priority needs are being served.”

Robert Greenleaf passed away in 1990, but his principles live on at the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, a non-profit organization that promotes education about servant leadership. The current CEO, Kent Keith, states, “The simplest way to explain it [servant leadership] would be to say that servant leaders focus on identifying and meeting the needs of others rather than trying to acquire power, wealth and fame for themselves.”

Robert Greenleaf, who spent much of his career in HR and personnel for AT&T, observed over many years that “there were leaders who were in it for themselves and leaders who were in it for others,” according to Keith. And, “his conclusion was that those who focused on others were the most effective leaders.”

In order to be a servant leader, one needs the following qualities, according to Greenleaf. Many of these are closely related with social and emotional intelligence.

1. Listening - Traditionally, leaders have been valued for their communication and decision making skills. Servant-leaders must reinforce these important skills by making a deep commitment to listening intently to others. Servant-leaders seek to identify and clarify the will of a group. They seek to listen receptively to what is being said (and not said). Listening also encompasses getting in touch with one's inner voice, and seeking to understand what one's body, spirit, and mind are communicating. Do people believe that you want to hear their ideas and will value them?

service oriented essay

2. Empathy - Servant-leaders strive to understand and empathize with others. People need to be accepted and recognized for their special and unique spirit. We must assume the good intentions of coworkers and not reject people, even when forced to reject their behavior or performance. People believe that you will understand what is happening in their lives and how it affects them?

3. Healing - Learning to heal is a powerful force for transformation and integration. One of the great strengths of servant-leadership is the potential for healing one's self and others. In "The Servant as Leader'', Greenleaf writes, "There is something subtle communicated to one who is being served and led if, implicit in the compact between the servant-leader and led is the understanding that the search for wholeness is something that they have." Do others come to you when their tanks are low and options are few, especially when something traumatic has happened in their lives?

4. Awareness - General awareness, and especially self-awareness, strengthens the servant leader. Making a commitment to foster awareness can be scary--one never knows what one may discover! As Greenleaf observed, "Awareness is not a giver of solace—it is just the opposite. It is a disturbance and an awakener. Able leaders are usually sharply awake and reasonably disturbed. They are not seekers of solace. They have their own inner serenity." Do others believe you have a strong sense of clarity and keen insight into what is going on?

5. Persuasion - Servant-leaders rely on persuasion, rather than positional authority in making decisions. Servant-leaders seek to convince others, rather than coerce compliance. This particular element offers one of the clearest distinctions between the traditional authoritarian model and that of servant-leadership. The servant-leader is effective at building consensus within groups. Do others follow up on your requests because they want to, or because they have to?

6. Conceptualization - Servant-leaders seek to nurture their abilities to "dream great dreams." The ability to look at a problem (or an organization) from a conceptualizing perspective means that one must think beyond day-to-day realities. Servant-leaders must seek a delicate balance between conceptualization and day-to-day focus. Do others contribute their ideas and vision for the good of the group when you are around?

7. Foresight - Foresight is a characteristic that enables servant-leaders to understand lessons from the past, the realities of the present, and the likely consequence of a decision in the future. It is deeply rooted in the intuitive mind. Do others have confidence in your ability to anticipate the results of decisions and their consequences?

8. Stewardship - Robert Greenleaf's view of all institutions was one in which CEO's, staff, directors, and trustees all play significant roles in holding their institutions in trust for the greater good of society. Do others believe you are preparing them to make a positive difference in the world?

9. Commitment to the Growth of People - Servant-leaders believe that people have an intrinsic value beyond their tangible contributions as workers. As such, servant-leaders are deeply committed to a personal, professional, and spiritual growth of each and every individual within the organization. Do people believe that you are committed to helping them learn, grow and develop as a whole person?

10. Building Community - Servant-leaders are aware that the shift from local communities to large institutions as the primary shaper of human lives has changed our perceptions and has caused a feeling of loss. Servant-leaders seek to identify a means for building community among those who work within a given institution. Do people feel a strong sense of community in the places where you lead?

In summary, servant leaders have a natural desire to serve others. This “calling” to serve is deeply rooted and value-based. Servant leaders have a desire to make a difference for other people as they journey through this life, and they pursue opportunities to impact others’ lives for the better. A servant leader is willing to sacrifice self-interests for the sake of others. Do people believe that you are willing to sacrifice self-interest for the good of the group?

service oriented essay

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Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership

  • What is Servant Leadership?

“The servant-leader is servant first
 It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first.” -Robert K. Greenleaf

Servant Leadership is a non-traditional leadership philosophy, embedded in a set of behaviors and practices that place the primary emphasis on the well-being of those being served.

The Servant as Leader

While servant leadership is a timeless concept, the phrase “servant leadership” was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in The Servant as Leader, an essay that he first published in 1970. In that essay, Greenleaf said:

“The servant-leader is servant first
 It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions
The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.

“The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?“

A servant-leader focuses primarily on the growth and well-being of people and the communities to which they belong. While traditional leadership generally involves the accumulation and exercise of power by one at the “top of the pyramid,” servant leadership is different. The servant-leader shares power, puts the needs of others first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible.

The Institution as Servant

Robert Greenleaf recognized that organizations as well as individuals could be servant-leaders. Indeed, he had great faith that servant-leader organizations could change the world. In his second major essay, The Institution as Servant, Greenleaf articulated what is often called the “credo.” There he said:

“This is my thesis: caring for persons, the more able and the less able serving each other, is the rock upon which a good society is built. Whereas, until recently, caring was largely person to person, now most of it is mediated through institutions – often large, complex, powerful, impersonal; not always competent; sometimes corrupt. If a better society is to be built, one that is more just and more loving, one that provides greater creative opportunity for its people, then the most open course is to raise both the capacity to serve and the very performance as servant of existing major institutions by new regenerative forces operating within them.”

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The Service-Oriented School

  • First Online: 22 July 2022

Cite this chapter

service oriented essay

  • Stephen P. Gordon 2  

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The service-oriented school is committed to serving the whole child, teaching the student to serve others, and student learning through service. Greenleaf’s servant leader is the model for leadership of the service-oriented school. The servant leader is a servant first and becomes a leader out of a desire to better serve. The serving school provides extensive support, including services for students with disabilities, a school-based health center, a guidance center, expanded learning opportunities, and assistance for families and the community. Service learning is embedded in the curriculum and most often carried out in the community. The components of community service learning include investigation, preparation and planning, application of the action plan, reflection, demonstration, and celebration. The students and teacher gather a variety of data to assess the different components of community service learning. The servant teacher not only facilitates service learning but also provides service to others at the individual, group, school, and community levels. Families are invited and empowered to serve the school and students in ways they choose. The community development model calls for a school-community partnership that serves students, families, neighborhoods, and the community. Partners committed to the community development model collaborate inside and outside of the school.

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Gordon, S.P. (2022). The Service-Oriented School. In: Developing Successful Schools . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06916-1_3

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A Service Orientation in Ed Tech

By  Joshua Kim

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What do you think are the most important attributes for a successful career in educational technology? 

The starting place is clearly a passion for education and strong interest in technology, and the desire to work at the intersection of both. An orientation towards change and an impatience with the status quo are probably essential as well.   But the longer I work in educational technology the more I think that the attribute most important for success in this career is a service orientation. A service orientation is fundamentally about putting the needs of the people we work with first. 

In broad terms, a service orientation can be contrasted with a traditional discipline based orientation. Newly minted academics, particularly academics looking to have traditional tenure-track degrees at research oriented institutions, place their professional identity within the discipline that they trained.  In a career in education technology our professional identity is squarely located within our institution, and our constituents within our institution are our primary concern.  So what does a service orientation in educational technology look like?    Alignment: The first and most important element of a service orientation is an alignment to the mission and goals of your institution. If you don't believe in what your college or university is trying to accomplish then you are in the wrong job. For technology folks it is very important to really understand and buy-into the larger mission of a potential academic employer. The day-to-day work life of the unit, division or department that you join will ultimately be about contributing to larger mission of the institution. Be sure that it is a good fit. Empathy: The need for empathy may seem like a strange requirement for success in the world of technologists. For most of our careers our professional success has been built on what we know, our technical and managerial skills. On our organizational and project management abilities. The training and experience we have gained in specialized technologies, information science, learning design, etc. etc. While it is true that all these skills are necessary, they are no longer sufficient for success in education technology. We need to learn to empathize with the people who use our technology services. Can we understand the world from their perspective? Can we put ourselves in their place, and then use this knowledge to design our services and systems that responds to that knowledge? Partnerships :  I like to view the relationships that we have in education technology with students, faculty, and staff as partnerships.  A successful partnership requires us to understand the desires, needs, and constraints of the people we work with.  In practice, this means a willingness to listen to what our students, faculty and fellow staff actually want and need with technology - as opposed to what we are most interested in providing.  Building these relationships and understanding these needs is time consuming and challenging.   The technology world moves so quickly that it feels impossible just to keep up with the day-to-day demands, much less take the time to engage in conversation and relationship building with our constituents.   If we fail to develop these partnerships, however, we will end up providing services that are a poor match for the diverse needs of our academic community, or only meet the needs of the vocal few.    Perhaps a service orientation is one of those attributes that is hard to define, but obvious when you see it.  Increasingly I look for a commitment to service when I am involved in hiring or promotion decisions. 

A service orientation is an attitude that can pervade every level and rank within an organization.   It is critical that our education technology leaders model service leadership , the idea that the higher up in the organization you go the more your job is to provide the staff that ultimately reports to you the tools and support they need to be effective in their positions.    How would you define a service orientation with education technology?   How do you think people who work in education technology can evolve towards this goal?    Do you see a service orientation in the technology leadership and with the technology people that you work with on your campus? What other professions within higher education also share a service orientation?

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Tackling the Personal Essay: Tips from a Notre Dame Admissions Counselor

Published: August 30, 2024

Author: Zach Klonsinski

If you ask almost any admissions professional which part of reading applications is their favorite, it’s likely their answer will be a resounding, “The essays!” Essays are where we get to engage with students’ hopes, fears, dreams, life experiences (and more) in their authentic voice. We are humbled every year getting to “meet” all the incredible young people who are applying to Notre Dame through their essays!

Tackling the Personal Essay: Tips from a Notre Dame Admissions Counselor graphic

Yet, writing an essay introducing yourself can be really hard. Maybe you’ve never done so before, or you haven’t for a really long time, and often it will seem really awkward. That’s OK!

It feels hard because it is–or at least it can be.

Don’t worry, though! I love sharing tips with applicants about the personal essay that will hopefully help you see it as an opportunity to learn more about yourself and then share that discernment with the colleges who will be fortunate enough to receive your application!

Getting started

The easiest way to get started is by simply brainstorming! I love using pen and paper (I’m anti-pencil, though I realize that may be a divisive opinion). The physical materials help me feel less constrained by technology, though you may find the technology comforting.

Use bulleted lists or short phrases to capture ideas, life experiences, values, and more. Every day, set aside five minutes to write about yourself or your college discernment process without stopping to think. Where does your mind lead you when you get out of your own way?

Ask your friends and family to help you identify values that are important to you or things that make you.. well
 you! Often it’s easier to highlight and say nice things about someone else than it is ourselves, so lean on those who know you well!

Group these collective nuggets to see if any patterns or stories emerge. Do you see any prompts on your application that align with your brainstorming? The Common Application, for example, has seven to choose from, including a make your own prompt! Start writing on one that makes you pause, as that means you might have something to say! Don’t be afraid to go longer than your word count or to use an atypical form of writing.

While that specific level of chaos may not work for you, I always recommend staying away from sentences and avoiding constraining yourself while writing because


Editing is more than spelling and grammar!

When we want to “edit” something, it can be tempting to start–and just as quickly end–with spell check. (Yes, your essay should have proper spelling and grammar, but please know we are not reading your essay with a red pen “grading” every single comma.)

What is far more important–though also far more intimidating–is your essay’s content.

What really improved my writing actually had nothing to do with me–rather, it was finding trusted editors to give me honest and constructive feedback. While it’s tempting to have your best friend or family member read your essay, I’ve found my best editors possess a strong rhetorical mind, ask thoughtful questions, and are not afraid to tell me when something isn’t working the way I think it is.

This may describe someone close to you, but maybe not. Maybe there’s a classmate or teacher who you have always admired, even if you don’t know them that well. Editing is an incredibly vulnerable process; don’t be afraid to lean into that vulnerability! I promise that a strong editor who works with your voice and style–rather than rewriting your essay how they would have–will help bring forth an authentic essay you didn’t even realize you could write!

Speaking of, authenticity will lead to your best essay

The best application essay is the one that helps us get to know you. Period. Full stop. Any topic can be a good topic, any topic can be a bad topic. At the end of the day, the topic you choose to write about is only a gateway to help us get to know you!

Let’s think of it another way. Say you printed out your essay at your school, without your name or other identifying information on it, and someone who knows you picked it up and read it. If they said, “I bet this is (your name)’s essay,” I can already tell you’re on the right track. There’s something truly you about it!

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literary Terms and Techniques › Russian Formalism

Russian Formalism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 19, 2020 • ( 1 )

Russian Formalism, a movement of literary criticism and interpretation, emerged in Russia during the second decade of the twentieth century and remained active until about 1930. Members of what can be loosely referred to as the Formalist school emphasized first and foremost the autonomous nature of literature and consequently the proper study of literature as neither a reflection of the life of its author nor as byproduct of the historical or cultural milieu in which it was created. In this respect, proponents of a formalist approach to literature attempted not only to isolate and define the “formal” properties of poetic language (in both poetry and prose) but also to study the way in which certain aesthetically motivated devices (e.g., defamiliarization [ ostranenie ]) determined the literariness or artfulness of an object.

From its inception, the Russian Formalist movement consisted of two distinct scholarly groups, both outside the academy: the Moscow Linguistic Circle, which was founded by the linguist Roman Jakobson in 1915 and included Grigorii Vinokur and Petr Bogatyrev, and the Petersburg OPOJAZ ( O bơčestvo izučenija PO Ăštičeskogo JAZ yka , “Society for the Study of Poetic Language”), which came into existence a year later and was known for scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Iurii Tynianov, Boris Eikhenbaum, Boris Tomashevskii, and Victor Vinogradov. (It should be noted that the term “formalist” was initially applied pejoratively to the Moscow Linguistic Circle and OPOJAZ.) Although the leading figures in the Russian Formalist movement tended to disagree with one another on what constituted formalism, they were united in their attempt to move beyond the psychologism and biographism that pervaded nineteenth-century Russian literary scholarship. Although the Symbolists had partially succeeded in redressing the imbalance of content over form, they “could not rid themselves of the notorious theory of the ‘harmony of form and content’ even though it clearly contradicted their bent for formal experimentation and discredited it by making it seem mere ‘aestheticism'” (Eikhenbaum, “Theory” 112).

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Viktor Shklovsky/The Daily Star

In many ways, however, the Formalists remained indebted to two leading nineteenth-century literary and linguistic theoreticians, Aleksandr Veselovskii (1838- 1906) and Aleksander Potebnia (1835-81). Veselovskii’s work in comparative studies of literature and folklore as well as in the theory of literary evolution attracted the attention of the Formalists (particularly Shklovsky, Eikhenbaum, and Vladimir Propp), who found much of interest in his positivist notions of literary history and the evolution of poetic forms. More specifically, as Peter Steiner argues, “mechanistic Formalism was in some respects a mirror image of Veselovskii’s poetics” insofar as both stressed the “genetic” aspect in their theories of literary evolution.

Like the Formalists, Potebnia made a careful distinction between practical and poetic language. But his wellknown maxim that “art is thinking in images” (an idea, it should be noted, that was promoted earlier by midnineteenth- century literary critics Vissarion Belinskii and Nikolai Chemyshevskii) made him an object of derision in Formalist writings. Shklovsky categorically objected to Potebnia’s notion of the image, arguing that since the same image could be found in various writers’ works, the image itself was less important than the techniques used by poets to arrange images. Shklovsky further noted that images were common in both prosaic (common, everyday language) and poetic language; hence, the image could not be considered uniquely essential to verbal art. Potebnia’s theories led to “far-fetched interpretations” and, what is more important, knowledge about the object itself rather than the poetic de vice(s) that enabled one to perceive the object (Shklovsky, “Art” 6). Above all, it was “literariness,” rather than either image or referent, that the Formalists pursued in their studies of poetry and prose. With slight variations, literariness in Formalism denoted a particular essential function present in the relationship or system of poetic works called literature.

The personal and intellectual cooperation of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and OPOJAZ yielded several volumes of essays (Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogo iazyka [Studies in the theory of poetic language], 6 vols., 1916- 23). Given that many of the Formalists had been students of the Polish linguist Jan Baudoin de Courtenay and were well apprised of the latest developments made in linguistics by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure , it is not surprising that most of the essays in these volumes reflect a predominant interest in linguistics (see Jakubinskii, “O zvukakh stikhotvomago iazyka” [On the sounds of poetic language], 1916; and Brik, “Zvukovye povtory” [Sound repetitions], 1917). But while members of the Moscow Linguistic Circle considered the study of poetics to fall under the broader category of linguistics, OPOJAZ Formalists (such as Eikhenbaum or Viktor Zhirmunskii in “Zadachi pofetiki” [The tasks of poetics], Nachala, 1921) insisted that the two be kept distinct. Shklovsky, for instance, remained predominantly concerned with literary theory (the laws of expenditure and economy in poetic language, general laws of plots and general laws of perception) rather than with linguistics, while Eikhenbaum and Tynianov are best known for their work as literary historians. Other Formalists, such as Tomashevskii (who was also interested in prose) and Jakobson, approached meter and rhythm in verse with a statistical approach and attempted to isolate the metrical laws in operation.

More specifically, the Formalists understood poetic language as operating both synchronically and, as Tzvetan Todorov notes, in an autonomous or “autotelic” fashion. The Formalists consistently stressed the internal mechanics of the poetic work over the semantics of extraliterary systems , that is, politics, ideology, economics, psychology, and so on. Thus, Roman Jakobson’s 1921 analysis of futurist poet Velemir Khlebnikov, and especially his notion of the samovitoe slovo (“self-made word”) and zaum (“transrational language”), serves essentially to illustrate the proposition that poetry is an utterance directed toward “expression” ( Noveishaia russkaia potziia [Recent Russian poetry]). Indeed, the futurist exploration of the exotic realm of zaum parallels the Formalist preoccupation with sound in poetic language at the phonemic level. In a similar way, essays such as Eikhenbaum’s “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ Is Made” (1919, trans., 1978), which examined narrative devices and acoustic wordplay in the text without drawing any extraliterary, sociocultural conclusions, emphasized the autonomous, selfreferential nature of verbal art. One of the most important of the devices Eikhenbaum described in that essay was skaz. Skaz , which in Russian is the root of the verb skazat’, “to tell,” may be compared to “free indirect discourse” (in German, erlebte Rede ), which is marked by the grammar of third-person narration and the style, tone, and syntax of direct speech on the part of the character.

Certain Formalists were not quite so eager to dismiss issues of content, however: Zhirmunskii maintained an interest in the thematic level of the poetic work; Tynianov considered an understanding of byt , the content of everyday, common language and experience as opposed to consciously poetic language, essential to any analysis of a poetic work. Rather than resolving the issue of form versus content, the Formalists tended instead to downplay it or to reframe it in new terms. For example, Eikhenbaum asserted the need to “destroy these traditional correlatives [form and content] and so to enrich the idea of form with new significance” (Eikhenbaum, “Theory” 115). “Technique,” continued Eikhenbaum in the same essay, is “much more significant in the long-range evolution of formalism than is the notion of ‘form'” (115). In his defense of the primacy of form, Shklovsky explained that “a new form appears not in order to express a new content, but in order to replace an old form, which has already lost its artistic value” (“Connection” 53).

Rejecting the subjectivism of nineteenth-century literary scholarship, the Formalists insisted that the study of literature be approached by means of a scientific and objective methodology. Their emphasis upon the scientific study of poetic language may be viewed in four ways. First, it may be traced to the more general nineteenth- century West European turn toward classification, genealogy, and evolution in the human sciences. In his best-known work, Morphology of the Folktale (1928, trans., 1958), Propp, a somewhat more peripheral yet not unimportant figure in the Formalist movement, employed the rhetoric and methodology of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Georges Cuvier in his attempt to isolate certain regularly recurring features of the folktale. Second, the Russian Formalists viewed their work as a direct challenge to what they perceived as the subjectivism and mysticism inherent in the Symbolist movement (i.e., the literature and criticism of Aleksander Blok, Bely, and Viacheslav Ivanov, among others). Tomashevskii went so far as to denounce the futurists as well as the Symbolists, claiming that it was futurism, especially, that “intensified to a hyperbolic clarity those features which had previously appeared only in hidden, mystically masked forms of Symbolism” (“Literature” 54). Third, Formalism sought to create a professional discipline independent of nineteenth-century configurations of university scholarship. And fourth, the Formalist shift toward science may also be considered as a response to the broader (and more radical) social, economic, and political transformations that the influx of industry and new technology helped to precipitate throughout early twentieth-century Russia. Not surprisingly, the poetic fetishization of the machine found in futurist poetics and avant-garde aesthetics quickly made its way into Formalist thought. Shklovsky’s analyses of poetic works are distinguished by his reliance upon the metaphor of the machine (Steiner 44-67) and the rhetoric of technology to account for such poetic devices and formal laws as automatization and defamiliarization. Ironically, objectives of scientificity in Formalist literary study were held up as an ideal, but only insofar as the Formalists believed scientificity would shield their theory from external influences, since everything outside the poetic system could only corrupt and obfuscate data extrapolated from the text. By 1930 it was clear that this was not to be the case.

For Shklovsky, “literariness” is a function of the process of defamiliarization, which involves “estranging,” “slowing down,” or “prolonging” perception and thereby impeding the reader’s habitual, automatic relation to objects, situations, and poetic form itself (see “Art” 12). According to Shklovsky, the difficulty involved in the process is an aesthetic end in itself, because it provides a heightened sensation of life. Indeed, the process of “laying bare” the poetic device, such as the narrative selfreflexiveness of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and its emphasis on the distinction between story and plot (see Theory of Prose ), remained for Shklovsky one of the primary signs of artistic self-consciousness.

The notion that new literary production always involves a series of deliberate, self-conscious deviations from the poetic norms of the preceding genre and/or literary movement remained fundamental to Shklovsky’s and other Formalists’ theories of literary evolution. Tynianov’s and Jakobson’s notion of the “dominant” approximates Shklovsky’s emphasis on defamiliarization, albeit as a feature of the diachronic system, inasmuch as it demands that other devices in the poetic text be “transformed” or pushed to the background to allow for the “foregrounding” of the dominant device. The function of the dominant in the service of literary evolution included the replacement of canonical forms and genres by new forms, which in turn would become canonized and, likewise, replaced by still newer forms.

Toward the end of the Formalist period, the emphasis on the synchronic nature of poetic devices was gradually mediated by a growing realization that literature and language should be considered within their diachronic contexts as well. Some critics— Krystyna Pomorska, Fredric Jameson , Jurij Striedter— regard this later shift in Formalist theory (as described particularly in the works of Tynianov) toward establishing a set of systemic relations between the internal and external organization of the poetic work as protostructuralist. However, newly emerging literary groups such as the Bakhtin Linguistic Circle ( M.M. Bakhtin , Pavel Medvedev, Valentin Voloshinov) and Prague School of Structuralism (Jan Mukarovsky) found the Formalists’ attempts to incorporate a diachronic view of the literary work insufficient. Critics (e.g., Medvedev) attacked the Formalists for refusing to address social and ideological concerns in poetic language. The same criticism, of course, was leveled at the Formalists by the Soviet state (especially by Anatolii Lunacharskii and Lev Trotskii), and with much more serious consequences. Various individuals and groups advocating or at least incorporating a Marxist perspective on literature, including members of the “sociological school” as well as the Bakhtin school in the 1920s, attacked the Formalists for neglecting the social and ideological discourses impinging upon the structure and function of the poetic work. In The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928), Medvedev dismisses the Formalists primarily for failing to provide an adequate sociological and philosophical justification for their theories. While many critics (e.g., Victor Erlich) approach Bakhtin’s work as distinct from that of the Formalist school, others (e.g., Gary Saul Morson and Striedter) view Bakhtin’s work as historically connected to the broader aims and implications of the Russian Formalist movement. Despite Tynianov and Jakobson’s attempt to connect the aims of Formalism to the broader issues of culture (as an entire complex of systems), Russian Formalism remained committed to the idea that “literariness” alone, rather than the referent and its various contingencies, historical and otherwise, was the proper focus of literary scholarship.

Perhaps the ongoing, seemingly irresoluble debate over what constitutes Formalism (both then and now) arises in part from what Jurij Striedter describes as the “dialogic” nature of Formalism itself. The Formalists, especially Tynianov, based their theories of literary evolution (and their own role therein) largely upon Hegel ‘s dialectical method. In his summary of the contributions of the Formalist movement, Eikhenbaum ironically concluded that “when we have a theory that explains everything, a ready-made theory explaining all past and future events and therefore needing neither evolution nor anything like it—then we must recognize that the formal method has come to an end” (“Theory” 139). Eikhenbaum’s vision of a type of Formalist dialectics suggests the dynamic character of the movement as a whole, though external political pressure was surely also a factor by the time Eikhenbaum wrote his essay in 1926.

Shklovsky’s 1930 denunciation of Formalism signaled not just that political pressures had worsened but that the de facto end of the Formalist movement had arrived. Even before Shklovsky was forced to abandon Formalism to political exigencies, the Moscow Linguistic Circle and OPOJAZ had already dissolved in the early 1920s, the former in 1920 with the departure of its founder, Roman Jakobson, for Czechoslovakia, the latter in 1923. With the banning of all artistic organizations (including the various associations of proletarian writers) and the introduction of “socialist realism” as the new, official socialist literature of the Soviet Union in 1932, the Russian Formalist movement came to an official close.

The Formalist approach continued to make itself felt, however, in European and, later, American literary scholarship (though, it should be noted, the formalism of new criticism possessed no direct relation to Russian Formalism). The immediate heirs to the Formalist legacy were the Prague Linguistic Circle (founded in 1926 by Jakobson and a group of Czech linguists) and the Bakhtin Linguistic Circle. The contributions of the Prague Linguistic Circle (especially of Mukarovsky) eventually made their way into the literary discourses of French structuralism. The work of French structural anthropologist Claude LĂ©vi-Strauss echoes and acknowledges the work of Propp and, to a lesser extent, Tynianov’s interest in cultural and literary systems. The Bakhtin Linguistic Circle’s work (which first attracted the attention of Western scholars in the 1970s) extends several Formalist concerns, not the least of which deal with narrative theory and discourse in the novel. The development of structural-semiotic research and the emergence of the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School in the 1960s (see the writings of such scholars as Viacheslav Ivanov, Iurii Lotman, Vladimir Toporov, Boris Gasparov, and Boris Uspenskii, to name just a few) may also be viewed as an extension of the aims and interests of both formalism and structuralism. Specifically, semiotic research continues to renew in various ways the Formalist emphasis upon language and the devices therein that function to generate meaning as sign systems.

In the United States, the Formalist approach found a sympathetic cousin in New Criticism, which emphasized, though in organic forms actually reminiscent of Russian Symbolism, the literary text as a discrete entity whose meaning and interpretation need not be contaminated by authorial intention, historical conditions, or ideological demands. Poststructuralism (and  Deconstruction ) in the 1970s and 1980s, though a partial critique of the organic notions of form in much American New Criticism, nevertheless extended certain Formalist assumptions. Figures as diverse as Roland Barthes , Paul de Man , Juia Kristeva , and Fredric Jameson are all heavily indebted to the aims and strategies of Russian Formalism.

Further Reading Stephen Bann and John E. Bowlt, eds., Russian Formalism: A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation (i973); Osip Brik, “Zvukovye povtory” [Sound repetitions], Sbomiki po teorii poeticheskago iazyka 2 (1917); Boris Eikhenbaum, “Kak sdelana ‘Shinel” Gogolia” (1919, “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ Is Made,” Gogol from the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays, ed. and trans. Robert A. Maguire, 1974), “Teoriia ‘formalnogometoda'” (1927, “TheTheory of the ‘Formal Method,”‘ Lemon and Reis [appeared first in Ukrainian in 1926]); Roman Jakobson, “The Dominant” (Matejka and Pomorska), Noveishaia russkaia potziia [Recent Russian poetry] (1921, Selected Writings, vol. 5,1979); Lev Jakubinskii, “O zvukakh stikhotvornago iazyka” [On the sounds of poetic language], Sbomiki po teorii poeticheskago iazyka 1 (1916); Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, eds. and trans., Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (1965); Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska, eds., Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views (1978); P. N. Medvedev, Formal’nyi metod v literaturovedenii (Kriticheskoe wedenie v sotsiologicheskuiu poetiku) (1928, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle, 1978 [sometimes attributed also to M. M. Bakhtin]); Christopher Pike, ed. and trans., The Futurists, the Formalists, and the Marxist Critique (1979); Vladimir Propp, Morfologiia skazki (1928, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott, 1958, 2d ed., ed. Louis A. Wagner, 1968); Victor Shklovsky, “Iskusstvo kak priem” (1917,”Art as Technique,” Lemon and Reis), “On the Connection between Devices of Siuzhet Construction and General Stylistic Devices” (1919, Bann and Bowlt), 0 teorii prozy (1927, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher, 1990), “Tristram Shendi: Sterna i teoriia romana” [Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and the theory of the novel] (1921, “Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary,” Lemon and Reis); B. V. Tomashevskii, “Literatura i biografiia” (1923, “Literature and Biography,” Matejka and Pomorska), Teoriia Literatury [Theory of literature] (1928); Iurii Tynianov, “O literaturnoi evoliucii” (1929, “On Literary Evolution,” Matejka and Pomorska), The Problem of Verse Language (1924, ed. and trans. Michael Sosa and Brent Harvey, 1981); Iurii Tynianov and Roman Jakobson, “Problemy izucheniia literatury i iazyka” (1928, “Problems in the Study of Literature and Language,” Matejka and Pomorska). Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine (1955, 3d ed., 1981); Aage A. Hansen-Löve, Der russische Formalismus (1978); Robert Louis Jackson and Stephen Rudy, eds., Russian Formalism: A Retrospective Glance (1985); Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (1972); Daniel P. Lucid, ed., Soviet Semiotics: An Anthology (1977); L. Μ. O’Toole and Ann Shukman, eds., Formalism: History, Comparison, Genre (1978), Formalist Theory (1977); Krystyna Pomorska, Russian Formalist Theory and Its Poetic Ambience (1968); Peter Steiner, Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics (1984); Jurij Striedter, Literary Structure, Evolution, and Value (1989); Ewa Μ. Thompson, Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism (1971); Tzvetan Todorov, Critique de la critique (1984, Literature and Its Theorists: A Personal View of Twentieth-Century Criticism, trans. Catherine Porter, 1987); Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (trans. Rose Strunsky, 1975). Source: Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

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Tags: Defamiliarization , Grigorii Vinokur , Linguistics , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Moscow Linguistic Circle , OPOJAZ , ostranenie , Petr Bogatyrev , Roman Jakobson , Society for the Study of Poetic LanguageSociety for the Study of Poetic Language

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All three core areas rely significantly on transit. Muscovites use the Metro at about the same rate as New Yorkers use the subway, taking about 200 trips each year. Tokyo citizens use their two Metro systems at nearly 1.5 times the rate used in Moscow.

But there are important differences. Moscow officials indicate that approximately two-thirds of Moscow's employment is in the central area. This is a much higher figure than in the world’s two largest central business districts -- Tokyo's Yamanote Loop and Manhattan -- each with quarter or less of their metropolitan employment. Both New York City and Tokyo's 23 wards have extensive freeway lengths in their cores, which help to make their traffic congestion more tolerable.

Moscow's arterial street pattern was clearly designed with the assumption that the dominant travel pattern would be into the core. Major streets either radiate from the core, or form circles or partial circles at varying distances from it. In New York City and Tokyo's  23 wards there are radial arterials, but,the major streets generally form a grid, which is more conducive to the cross-town traffic and the more random trip patterns that have emerged in the automobile age.

Moscow has become much, more reliant on cars,  following the examples of metropolitan areas across Europe. The old outer circular road, which encloses nearly all of the central municipality, was long ago upgraded to the MKAD, a 10 lane freeway as long as Washington's I-495 Capital Beltway (65 miles or 110 kilometers). The MKAD has become a primary commercial corridor, with large shopping centers and three nearby IKEAs.

It is not surprising, therefore, that traffic congestion and air pollution became serious problems in Moscow. The road system that had been adequate when only the rich had cars was no longer sufficient. The "cookie-cutter" apartment blocks, which had served Iron Curtain poverty, had become obsolete. The continued densification of an already very dense core city led to an of intensification of traffic congestion and air pollution.

Transit-oriented Moscow was not working, nor could "walkability" make much difference. In such a large urban area, it is inevitable that average travel distances, especially to work, will be long. Geographically large employment markets are the very foundation of major metropolitan areas. If too many jobs are concentrated in one area, then the traffic becomes unbearable, as many become able to afford cars and use them. Traffic congestion was poised to make Moscow dysfunctional.

The leadership of both the Russian Federation and the city of Moscow chose an unusual path, in light of currently fashionable urban planning dogma. Rather than making promises they could not keep about how higher densities or more transit could make the unworkable city more livable, they chose the practical, though in urban planning circles, the "politically incorrect" solution:  deconcentrating the city and its traffic.

Last year, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev proposed that Moscow be expanded to a land area 2.3 times as large. Local officials and parliament were quickly brought on board. The expanded land area is nearly double that of New York's suburban Nassau County, and is largely rural (Note 2). Virtually all of the expansion will be south of the MKAD.

The plan is to create a much larger, automobile-oriented municipality, with large portions of the Russian government to be moved to the expanded area. Employment will be decentralized, given the hardening of the transport arterials that makes the monocentric employment pattern unsustainable. Early plans call for commercial construction more than four times that of Chicago's loop.

At the same time, the leadership does not intend to abandon the older, transit-oriented part of the municipality. Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has voiced plans to , adding that there will be the opportunity to build underground parking facilities as refurbishments proceed. Moscow appears to be preparing to offer its citizens both an automobile-oriented lifestyle and a transit-oriented one. The reduced commercial traffic should also make central Moscow a more attractive environment for tourists, who spend too much time traveling between their hotels and historic sites, such as the Kremlin and St. Basil's.

As Moscow expands, the national leadership also wants the Russian family to expand. Russia has been losing population for more than 20 years. Since 1989, the population of the Russian Federation has dropped by 4.5 million residents. When the increase of 3.0 million in the Moscow area is considered, the rest of the nation has lost approximately 7.5 million since 1989. Between the 2002 and the 2010 censuses, Russia lost 2.2 million people and dropped into a population of 142.9 million. Russia's population losses are pervasive. Out of the 83 federal regions, 66 lost population during the last census.

Continued population losses could significantly impair national economic growth. The projected smaller number of working age residents will produce less income, while a growing elderly population will need more financial support. This is not just a Russian problem, but Russia is the first of the world's largest nations to face the issue while undergoing a significant population loss.

The government is planning strong measures to counter the demographic decline, increase the birth rate, and create a home ownership-based "Russian Dream". Families having three or more children will be across the nation., including plots of up to nearly one-third of an acre ( ).  Many of these houses could be built in Moscow's new automobile- oriented two-thirds, as well as in the extensive suburbs on the other three sides of the core municipality.

While population decline is the rule across the Russian Federation, the Moscow urban area has experienced strong growth. Between 2002 and 2010, the Moscow urban area grew from 14.6 million to 16.1 million residents (Note 3). This 1.3 percent annual rate of increase  exceeds the recently the recently announced growth in Canada (1.2 percent). This rate of increase exceeds that of all but 8 of the 51 major metropolitan areas (Note 4) in the United States between 2000 and 2010.

While the core district grew 6 percent  and added 41,000 residents, growth was strongest outside the core, which accommodated 97 percent of the new residents (See Table). Moscow's outer districts grew by nearly 1.1 million residents, an 11 percent increase, and its suburbs continued to expand, adding 400,000 residents, an increase of 10  percent. These areas have much lower densities than the city, with many single-family houses.




Table
Moscow Urban Area Population
2002 2010 Change % Change Share of Growth
Inner Moscow 701,000 743,000 41,000 5.9% 2.7%
Outer Moscow 9,681,000 10,772,000 1,090,000 11.3% 70.3%
Suburban 4,198,000 4,617,000 420,000 10.0% 27.0%
Total 14,581,000 16,132,000 1,551,000 10.6% 100.0%
Note: Suburban population includes the total population of each district and city that is at least partially in the urban area.

Moscow, like other international urban areas , is decentralizing, despite considerable barriers. The expansion will lead to even more decentralization, which is likely to lead to less time "stuck in traffic" and more comfortable lifestyles. Let's hope that Russia's urban development policies, along with its plans to restore population growth, will lead to higher household incomes and much improved economic performance.

Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “ War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life ”

Note 1: The 23 ward (ku) area of Tokyo is the geography of the former city of Tokyo, which was abolished in the 1940s. There is considerable confusion about the geography of Tokyo. For example, the 23 ward area is a part of the prefecture of Tokyo, which is also called the Tokyo Metropolis, which has led some analysts to think of it as the Tokyo metropolitan area (labor market area). In fact, the Tokyo metropolitan area, variously defined, includes, at a minimum the prefectures of Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba and Saitama with some municipalities in Gunma, Ibaraki and Tochigi. The metropolitan area contains nearly three times the population of the "Tokyo Metropolis."

Note 2: The expansion area (556 square miles or 1,440 square kilometers) has a current population of 250,000.

Note 3: Includes all residents in suburban districts with at least part of their population in the urban area.

Note 4: Urban area data not yet available.

Photo: St. Basil's Cathedral (all photos by author)

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Moscow is bursting Noblesse

Moscow is bursting Noblesse at the seams. The core city covers more than 420 square miles (1,090 kilometers), and has a population of approximately 11.5 million people. With 27,300 residents per square mile (10,500 per square kilometer), Moscow is one percent more dense than the bleach anime watch city of New York, though Moscow covers 30 percent more land. The 23 ward area of Tokyo (see Note) is at least a third more dense, though Moscow's land area is at least half again as large as Tokyo. All three core areas rely

Belgravia Villas is a new

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Russians seeing the light while Western elites are bickering?

What an extremely interesting analysis - well done, Wendell.

It is also extremely interesting that the Russian leadership is reasonably pragmatic about urban form, in contrast to the "planners" of the post-rational West.

An acquaintance recently sent me an article from "The New Yorker", re Moscow's traffic problems.

The article "abstract" is HERE (but access to the full article requires subscription)

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gessen

One classic quote worth taking from it, is: "People will endure all manner of humiliation to keep driving".

I do find it odd that the "New Yorker" article author says nothing at all about the rail transit system Moscow had, on which everyone was obliged to travel, under Communism. It can't surely have vaporised into thin air?

Moscow is a classic illustration of just how outmoded rails are, and how important "automobility" is, when the auto supplants rails so rapidly than even when everybody did travel on rails up to a certain date, and the road network dates to that era, when nobody was allowed to own a car; an article written just 2 decades later does not even mention the rail transit system, other than to criticise the mayor for "failing to invest in a transit system".......!!!!!!!!

This is also a give-away of "The New Yorker's" inability to shake off the modern PC ideology on rails vs cars.

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Guest Essay

I Swore Off Air-Conditioning, and You Can, Too

An upright fan and a portable air-conditioner in a room.

By Stan Cox

Mr. Cox lives in Salina, Kan., and is the author of “Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World.”

Whenever people ask me how my wife and I have endured 25 Kansas summers almost entirely without air-conditioning, I like to say we do it because air-conditioning makes it too hot outside. We’re not ascetics, Luddites or misers; we just want to keep living comfortably, indoors and out.

It’s not just that air-conditioning is making our summers even hotter. (On a sweltering night in a city like Houston, the hot air that A.C. units blast out over the streets can raise outdoor temperatures up to three or four degrees.) It’s also that air-conditioning has altered the way most Americans experience heat.

Our bodies have grown so accustomed to climate-controlled indoor spaces, set at a chilly 69 degrees, that anything else can feel unbearable. And the greenhouse gases created by the roughly 90 percent of American households that own A.C. units mean that running them even in balmy temperatures is making the climate crisis worse.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that anyone switch the air off in the middle of a heat wave. Year in and year out, heat waves kill more people than any other type of natural disaster. If you live in Miami or Phoenix, you need air-conditioning to survive the summer. But if you live in the middle of the country, try leaving the air-conditioning off when it’s hot but not too hot.

Our species evolved, biologically and culturally, under wildly varying climatic conditions, and we haven’t lost that ability to adapt. Research suggests that when we spend more time in warm or hot summer weather, we can start feeling comfortable at temperatures that once felt insufferable. That’s the key to reducing dependence on air-conditioning: The less you use it, the easier it is to live without it.

When I was growing up in Georgia, my family moved into our first air-conditioned house when I was 12, and I loved it. But I left home for college in the 1970s, and I’ve lived mostly without A.C. ever since.

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