what is influence essay

Sample Essays: Influential Person

Please select from the following sample application essays:

Essay 1: Wellesley | Essay 2: Harvard | Essay 3: Harvard

Note: The following essays were not edited by EssayEdge Editors. They appear as they were initially reviewed by admissions officers.

Sample Essay 1

Wellesley, Influence of mother

It took me eighteen years to realize what an extraordinary influence my mother has been on my life. She's the kind of person who has thoughtful discussions about which artist she would most want to have her portrait painted by (Sargent), the kind of mother who always has time for her four children, and the kind of community leader who has a seat on the board of every major project to assist Washington's impoverished citizens. Growing up with such a strong role model, I developed many of her enthusiasms. I not only came to love the excitement of learning simply for the sake of knowing something new, but I also came to understand the idea of giving back to the community in exchange for a new sense of life, love, and spirit.

My mother's enthusiasm for learning is most apparent in travel. I was nine years old when my family visited Greece. Every night for three weeks before the trip, my older brother Peter and I sat with my mother on her bed reading Greek myths and taking notes on the Greek Gods. Despite the fact that we were traveling with fourteen-month-old twins, we managed to be at each ruin when the site opened at sunrise. I vividly remember standing in an empty ampitheatre pretending to be an ancient tragedian, picking out my favorite sculpture in the Acropolis museum, and inserting our family into modified tales of the battle at Troy. Eight years and half a dozen passport stamps later I have come to value what I have learned on these journeys about global history, politics and culture, as well as my family and myself.

While I treasure the various worlds my mother has opened to me abroad, my life has been equally transformed by what she has shown me just two miles from my house. As a ten year old, I often accompanied my mother to (name deleted), a local soup kitchen and children's center. While she attended meetings, I helped with the Summer Program by chasing children around the building and performing magic tricks. Having finally perfected the "floating paintbrush" trick, I began work as a full time volunteer with the five and six year old children last June. It is here that I met Jane Doe, an exceptionally strong girl with a vigor that is contagious. At the end of the summer, I decided to continue my work at (name deleted) as Jane's tutor. Although the position is often difficult, the personal rewards are beyond articulation. In the seven years since I first walked through the doors of (name deleted), I have learned not only the idea of giving to others, but also of deriving from them a sense of spirit.

Everything that my mother has ever done has been overshadowed by the thought behind it. While the raw experiences I have had at home and abroad have been spectacular, I have learned to truly value them by watching my mother. She has enriched my life with her passion for learning, and changed it with her devotion to humanity. In her endless love of everything and everyone she is touched by, I have seen a hope and life that is truly exceptional. Next year, I will find a new home miles away. However, my mother will always be by my side.

The topic of this essay is the writer's mother. However, the writer definitely focuses on herself, which makes this essay so strong. She manages to impress the reader with her travel experience, volunteer and community experience, and commitment to learning without ever sounding boastful or full of herself. The essay is also very well organized.

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Sample Essay 2

Harvard, Favorite fictional character

Of all the characters that I've "met" through books and movies, two stand out as people that I most want to emulate. They are Attacus Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird and Dr. Archibald "Moonlight" Graham from Field of Dreams. They appeal to me because they embody what I strive to be. They are influential people in small towns who have a direct positive effect on those around them. I, too, plan to live in a small town after graduating from college, and that positive effect is something I must give in order to be satisfied with my life.

Both Mr. Finch and Dr. Graham are strong supporting characters in wonderful stories. They symbolize good, honesty, and wisdom. When the story of my town is written I want to symbolize those things. The base has been formed for me to live a productive, helpful life. As an Eagle Scout I represent those things that Mr. Finch and Dr. Graham represent. In the child/adolescent world I am Mr. Finch and Dr. Graham, but soon I'll be entering the adult world, a world in which I'm not yet prepared to lead.

I'm quite sure that as teenagers Attacus Finch and Moonlight Graham often wondered what they could do to help others. They probably emulated someone who they had seen live a successful life. They saw someone like my grandfather, 40-year president of our hometown bank, enjoy a lifetime of leading, sharing, and giving. I have seen him spend his Christmas Eves taking gifts of food and joy to indigent families. Often when his bank could not justify a loan to someone in need, my grandfather made the loan from his own pocket. He is a real-life Moonlight Graham, a man who has shown me that characters like Dr. Graham and Mr. Finch do much much more than elicit tears and smiles from readers and movie watchers. Through him and others in my family I feel I have acquired the values and the burning desire to benefit others that will form the foundation for a great life. I also feel that that foundation is not enough. I do not yet have the sophistication, knowledge, and wisdom necessary to succeed as I want to in the adult world. I feel that Harvard, above all others, can guide me toward the life of greatness that will make me the Attacus Finch of my town.

This essay is a great example of how to answer this question well. This applicant chose characters who demonstrated specific traits that reflect on his own personality. We believe that he is sincere about his choices because his reasons are personal (being from a small town, and so forth). He managed to tell us a good deal about himself, his values, and his goals while maintaining a strong focus throughout.

Sample Essay 3

Harvard, Family illness: Mother's fight with cancer

I am learning, both through observations and first-hand experiences, that there are many mishaps in life which seem to be unexplainable and unfair, and yet have devastating consequences. Disease fits into this category. Its atrocity does not stem from the fact that it is a rare or uncommon occurrence, since illness and disease pervade our lives as we hear numerous stories of sick people and come into contact with them each day. However, there is a marked difference between reading in the newspaper that a famous rock star or sports icon has tested H.I.V. positive and discovering that your own mother has been diagnosed with cancer.

Undoubtedly, the most influential people in my life have been my mother and father. It is to them that I credit many of my accomplishments and successes--both inside and outside of school. Throughout my childhood, my parents have always fostered and encouraged me in all my endeavors. At all my sporting events, spelling bees, concerts, and countless other activities, they have always been front row and center. My parents, in conjunction with twelve years of Catholic training, have also instilled in me a sound belief in a loving, caring God, which I have come to firmly believe. It therefore should not come as a surprise that the news of my mothers sickness would greatly alter my entire outlook on life. Where was my God?

My mother, in fact, had been aware of her condition in the spring of my junior year in high school. She deliberately did not inform my sister or me of her illness because she did not want to distract us from our studies. Instead, my mother waited for the completion of her radiation therapy treatments. At this time, she brought me into her room, sat me down on the same wooden rocking chair from which she used to read me bedtime stories, and began to relate her story. I did not weep, I did not flinch. In fact, I hardly even moved, but from that point onward, I vowed that I would do anything and everything to please my mother and make her proud of me.

Every subsequent award won and every honor bestowed upon me has been inspired by the recollection of my mother's plight. I look to her as a driving force of motivation. In her I see the firm, enduring qualities of courage, strength, hope, and especially love. Whenever I feel discouraged or dispirited, I remember the example set by my mother and soon become reinvigorated. Instead of groveling in my sorrow, I think of all the pain and suffering that my mother had to endure and am revived with new energy after realizing the triviality of my own predicament. For instance, last year, when I was playing in a championship soccer game, my leg became entangled with a forwards leg on the other team, and I wound up tearing my medial cruciate ligament. I was very upset for having injured myself in such a seemingly inane manner. Completely absorbed in my own anguish, I would not talk to anyone and instead lamented on the sidelines. But then I remembered something that my mother used to say to me whenever something like this happened: If this is the worst thing that ever happens to you, I'll be very happy, and you'll be very lucky. Instantly, many thoughts race through my mind. I pictured my mother as a young thirteen-year-old walking to the hospital every day after school to visit her sick father. She had always told me how extremely painful it had been to watch his body become emaciated as the cancer advanced day by day and finally took its toll. I then pictured my mother in the hospital, thirty years later, undergoing all the physically and mentally debilitating tests, and having to worry about her husband and her children at the same time. I suddenly felt incredibly ashamed at how immature I had been acting over my own affliction. I gathered my thoughts and instead of sulking or complaining, helped coach my team to victory.

I am very happy to say that my mother is now feeling much better and her periodic checkups and C.A.T. scans have indicated that she is doing very well. Nevertheless, her strength and courage will remain a constant source of inspiration to me. I feel confident to greet the future with a resolute sense of hope and optimism.

The majority of the suggestions for this essay highlight the danger inherent in relying on an overly poignant topic, in this case the writer's mother's bout with cancer. Part of why the reactions to this piece are so passionate (and why there are so many of them) is because had the applicant just taken a slightly different approach, he could have had a powerful and touching composition on his hands. It is always frustrating when a piece with so much potential misses the mark. In this case, the material and emotion are all there. Had he spent more time and written with more sincerity, this essay might have been a real winner.

I wish this kid had started the essay with his mom sitting him down in the rocking chair. That would have been a powerful beginning. In general, using the introduction of the essay to paint a scene or mood can be very effective.

He should begin with the most simple and striking sentence possible, such as "On January 5, 1995, my mother learned that she had cancer." Use real times and exact places. Let the most dramatic point go where it belongs, at the end of the sentence--also known as the stress point.

Because this topic is so personal, I yearn to know more about the student's reaction to his mom's cancer, how he and his family dealt with it over time. As written, things just seem a bit too tidy.

The author describes a valuable life lesson, but I find the writing style to be artificial and a bit maudlin. I imagine he resorted to the thesaurus more than once.

The writer tells us a sad story about his mother with cancer and how he has strived to do his best because of what his mother has been through. The topic can be a tear jerker, but this essay lacked the depth and richness that other essays with similar topics possess.

The experience obviously impacted the student very much. But what students do not realize is that they do not have to share such personal issues within the confines of a college essay.

I don't believe the "epiphany" in the conclusion as it's described. It's too easy and convenient to be believable. He begins his description with "For instance," which negates almost everything that follows. When he sees his mother in his mind, he "instantly" thinks this and "suddenly" does that, and finally "helped coach his team to victory." He "coached" the team. "Cheered" maybe. "Coached?" No way.

This essay smells of contrivance. Yes, his mother's bout with cancer affected him. Just not in the way he wants me to believe. This is the "lasting sanctifying effect" essay. Look at what the writer is actually saying (using his own words): I used to be "absorbed in my own anguish" and "lament" my bouts with adversity. But, "instantly" or "suddenly" (take your pick), I became a young man "confident to greet the future with a resolute sense of hope and optimism." Why not say, "I used to be a thoughtless, immature teenager. My mother got cancer. I'm now a thoughtful, mature adult. You should admit me to _____." His essay is no less subtle.

Return to: Lesson One: College Essay Questions

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Leadership And Influence Essay

To uncover the secrets of leadership and influence, It’s like exploring a hidden treasure that holds the keys to making a positive impact on the world. So, put on your thinking caps, and let’s dive into the exciting adventure of understanding how leadership and influence can shape our lives.

Table of Contents

How To Write An Essay On Leadership and Influence

Step 1: collect essay ideas:.

Before we start our journey, let’s gather some cool ideas about leadership and influence:

• Leadership Defined: What is leadership? It’s like being the captain of a ship, guiding everyone toward a common goal.
• Qualities of a Leader: Leaders possess qualities like kindness, confidence, and the ability to listen to others.
• Influence in Everyday Life: Influence is like a superpower – it’s how we inspire others to think or act a certain way.
• Positive Impact: Leaders and influencers can make the world a better place by spreading kindness, empathy, and good ideas.

Making Essay Outline

1. Introduction

Introduce the topic of leadership and influence, comparing them to hidden treasures that hold the keys to positive change.

2. Leadership Defined

Define leadership as the role of guiding others toward a common goal, just like a captain leading a ship.

3. Qualities of a Leader

Discuss important qualities that make a leader, such as kindness, confidence, and the ability to listen and understand.

4. Influence in Everyday Life

Explore the concept of influence as a superpower that impacts how we interact with others and shape their thoughts and actions.

5. Positive Impact

Explain how leaders and influencers can use their powers for good, spreading kindness, empathy, and positive ideas.

6. Inspiring Change

Share stories of real-life leaders and influencers who have made a positive impact on their communities or the world.

7. Personal Leadership

Reflect on how even as young learners, we can practice leadership by being role models, helping others, and making good choices.

8. Final Thoughts

Summarize the main points and encourage readers to embrace their potential as leaders and influencers to create a better world.

Writing the Essay About Leadership and Influence

Introduction:.

Imagine we’re setting off on a grand adventure, like discovering a hidden treasure that can change the world. Today, our treasure is the knowledge of leadership and influence. It’s like unlocking a magical power that can make a positive impact on people’s lives. So, put on your thinking cap, and let’s dive into the exciting journey of understanding the secrets of leadership and influence.

Leadership Defined:

For example – you’re the captain of a ship, guiding your crew toward a faraway island. That’s what leadership is like – being a guide who helps others reach a common goal. Just like a captain leads the ship, leaders lead groups of people. It’s not about being bossy, but about showing the way and making sure everyone works together smoothly.

Qualities of a Leader:

For example, if you’re a superhero with special qualities that help you save the day. Leaders also have special qualities that make them stand out. They’re like superheroes of kindness and understanding. They’re kind and treat others with respect. They’re confident, which means they believe in themselves and their abilities. And just like a hero listens to others, leaders listen to the ideas and thoughts of their team.

Influence in Everyday Life:

Think of influence as a magical spell that can change the way people think and act. It’s like when you tell your friends about a cool game, and they want to play it too. Influence is how we inspire others to think or act in a certain way. It’s not about forcing, but about inspiring. Just like a magical spell, influence can make people excited and motivated.

Positive Impact:

If you have a magic wand that spreads kindness, empathy, and good ideas. That’s what leaders and influencers do – they use their powers to make the world better. They’re like shining stars that brighten everyone’s day. They spread kindness, make others feel good about themselves, and share ideas that help the world. It’s like being a hero who brings positivity wherever they go.

Inspiring Change:

Now, let’s journey into the real world and meet some inspiring leaders and influencers. Think of Malala Yousafzai, who stood up for girls’ education, or Greta Thunberg, who raised awareness about climate change. They’re like heroes who use their voices to create change. They show us that even young learners like us can make a big difference.

Personal Leadership:

Think for a while, if you’re a character in a game, making choices that affect the outcome. In life, we can also make choices that show leadership. It’s like being a mini leader, making good decisions, and setting an example for others. We can help our friends, be kind to everyone, and stand up for what’s right. Just like a hero in a game, our actions can inspire others to be their best.

Final Thoughts:

We’re all potential leaders and influencers, capable of making positive changes in our world. Leadership is about guiding and showing kindness, while influence is the magic that spreads positivity. So, let’s use our superpowers of leadership and influence to make the world a better place, one kind of action and inspiring idea at a time.

Hello! Welcome to my Blog StudyParagraphs.co. My name is Angelina. I am a college professor. I love reading writing for kids students. This blog is full with valuable knowledge for all class students. Thank you for reading my articles.

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Strengthen Your Ability to Influence People

• Benjamin Laker
• Charmi Patel

Right from the start.

There are two kinds of influence. If you aspire to be a leader, you must understand transformational and transactional influence.

• Transactional influence is often used in top-down, hierarchical organizations and is focused on the tasks to be done. This kind of leader is often direct and to the point.
• Transformational influence is rooted in empathy and is often seen in more flat organizations. This kind of leader relies on encouragement and support to motivate and inspire others.
• As traditional, top-down organizations flatten, transformational influence is becoming increasingly more important.
• To master the art of influence, you need to: 1) building a rapport and trust with your team; 2) become an active listener; 3) commit to your team; and 4) set an excellent example.

Where your work meets your life. See more from Ascend here .

Where do you see yourself in 10 years? Do you aspire to be in the C-suite, leading people and driving change? If you do, you’ll need to master the art of influence — a skill which, like any other, can be learned.

• Benjamin Laker is a professor of leadership at Henley Business School, University of Reading. Follow him on Twitter .
• Charmi Patel is an Associate Professor in International Human Resource Management at Henley Business School.

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How to Write a Descriptive Essay on an Influential Person in Your Life

How to Write a Speech About Someone I Admire

A descriptive essay on an influential person can be about someone who has had a positive or negative impact on your life. This person can be a teacher, a coach, a family member, a friend, an employer, a political figure, a historical figure or even a fictional character. The key element of writing this type of essay is to reflect on how and why the person has influenced you.

Focus Your Essay

As in any essay, when writing about an influential person in your life you should include a thesis statement. In this case, the thesis statement declares how or why this person has influenced you life. For example, if writing about your soccer coach, you may write, "Through his advice and the example of his character, my soccer coach has inspired me to never be lazy, to get back up after a fall, and to be a confident leader." The thesis statement gives you, the writer, a focus and direction so that you are not only describing a person, but exploring the causes and effects of that person's impact on you.

Start With an Anecdote

Instead of starting the essay with an explicit physical or personal description of the person, you can more meaningfully reveal who the individual is by sharing a personal story. For example, if you are writing about your sibling, you can begin the essay with a specific memory of a moment or experience you shared in which your relationship or your sibling's strengths and weaknesses are revealed through actions. This is an engaging way to entertain the reader while imparting valuable information about the person you are describing.

Describe the Person

At some point in the descriptive essay, you need to describe the influential person. This description -- which can include physical attributes, biographical information and personality traits -- should be related with concrete language. The description should paint a vivid picture of all that matters about the person. The writer needs to be judicious in which descriptive material she selects for inclusion in the essay; the information should be determined by the overall point being made in the essay. For example, if your thesis statement is about how Abraham Lincoln is your hero because of all his accomplishments relative to the social and political conditions of the time, descriptions of his favorite hobbies or hair color may not be pertinent. The description serves to give a deeper and more vivid portrait of the influential person, but should ultimately serve the higher cause of the thesis statement and the effect of the person on the writer.

Describe Your Relationship

When writing about an influential person, you have to talk not just about the person, but also about the reason the person has made an impact on your life; this means you have to talk about yourself, what specific things you have learned from this person, and how those lessons affect you today. An important strategy for successfully describing the relationship between the person and the writer is to give specific examples. For example, don't just say, "my grandmother is generous"; give specific examples of her generosity: "she always makes sure everyone is fed before eating," or "she sold her jewelry to help pay for a car so that I could drive to work." These specific examples are more powerful and evoke more empathy than general descriptive words such as "kind" or "generous."

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Soheila Battaglia is a published and award-winning author and filmmaker. She holds an MA in literary cultures from New York University and a BA in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley. She is a college professor of literature and composition.

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Persuasion — Influence Influences

Influence Influences

• Categories: Persuasion

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Published: Mar 5, 2024

Words: 496 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

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How to Write an Influence Essay

Elizabeth sobiski.

Influence essays are about a real or fictional character who has had significant influence on your life. This might be a relative, friend, coworker, musician, writer, or someone in history. Fictional characters could be people described in songs, through poetry or other writings and art. These types of essays are popular with colleges and universities as a assessment of an applicant. The key with influence essays is to be honest, and rather than writing about someone just because you think it will impress the readers most.

Explore this article

• List the people you look up to

1 List the people you look up to

List the people you look up to, whom you trust for advice, or who have helped during rough times. Is there a certain song or artist you always turn to? This might be someone or something that makes you feel better when you are down, as well as reinforcing a good mood.

Narrow the list to the two top contenders. It is helpful to write down the characteristics of your choices to clarify your thinking. Doing this also creates a deeper understanding of yourself and of why this person or thing has such a great influence on you. This understanding will help make the topic of the essay meaningful to the reader.

Identify specific situations of influence. List a few of the most important occasions that this person or thing has truly helped you. This list will make the essay writing go smoothly, and it will be easier to weed out the things you don't really want in it, which cuts down on the number of revisions.

Draft the essay. This type of essay follows the same general guidelines for structure as other essays. Include an introductory paragraph, which will name the person or thing of influence, followed by supporting paragraphs that depict the specifics of the influence. The essay ends with a conclusion paragraph. The essay's length depends on what is required. A single-page essay will highlight one incident or description, while you'll add more detail and examples to longer essays.

• If you are having a difficult time deciding on the person or thing that has influenced you the most, do not be tempted by obvious choices such as Gandhi, Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King. Unless these people have had a profound impact on you, the readers of the essay might feel that the assignment was not taken seriously.
• Remember that a person of influence in your life does not have to be someone with whom others are familiar. Your essay will introduce them and help the reader understand the person.

About the Author

Elizabeth Sobiski has been writing professionally since 2005. She provides businesses such as Burdick and Lee Galleries, Clearwater Fishing Charters and Read Finder with custom content to keep their digital and print media fresh, informative and directed to their target audience. Sobiski holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Roosevelt University in Chicago.

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‘Someone Who Has Made an Impact On Your Life’ Essay Sample

EssayEdge > Blog > ‘Someone Who Has Made an Impact On Your Life’ Essay Sample

“Describe a person who has influenced you” is the opening phrase of several personal statement prompts that go on to ask that you provide details of what that influence was. The major mistake made in these personal statement essays is that candidates make the essay about the individual and that individual’s achievements and character, which is all fine, but not if it is at the expense of detailing how that person has influenced you. The other mistake candidates make in response to this prompt is that they answer with the intuitive “first response,” which is usually a parent. And there is nothing wrong with offering a parent as the influential person – but only if in so doing, you can show that it was your parent who provided you with the abilities and interests that set you apart and can contribute to the target program.

As is the case with most personal statement essays, the success of your essay is determined before you begin writing – by what you decide to offer as content. In this essay there are many approaches to use – parents, siblings, teachers, coaches, friends, political leaders, celebrities – all of these categories can be tapped when it comes to the choice of who it was that influenced you. Let’s discuss how to write an essay about someone who influenced you and avoid the most typical mistakes.

The Trap to Avoid in Your “Who Has Influenced You the Most in Your Life” Essay

The trap to avoid is the trap of selecting a person without thinking through what you can offer as the influence. What is the strongest aspect of your candidacy? Your creativity? Your communication skills? Your technical background? Your professional background? The answer to this question – “What is the strongest aspect of your candidacy?” – is what should determine your subject matter for personal statement essays about a person who influenced you.

If your strength, say, is your background in a particular field, in your personal statement about a person who influenced you, identify the person who steered you in the direction of that field.

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By doing this, you will use your essay about a person who influenced your life not only as a means to describe someone with positive traits you would like to emulate, but someone whose influence in your life was critical in letting you develop those skills that most set you apart as a candidate.

• Writing a Great Personal Statement
• Describe a significant experience or achievement
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• Career Advice
• Seeking an Administrative Job

Gaining Influence in Your Career

By  Marie A. Cini and Craig Weidemann

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In the wildly popular musical Hamilton , by Lin-Manuel Miranda , one of the highlights is a number sung by Aaron Burr, titled “The Room Where It Happens.” In it, Burr bemoans the fact that Alexander Hamilton is more of a political insider than he is, having participated in a closed-door meeting with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to move the capital city in exchange for the support of Hamilton’s financial system (the Compromise of 1790). This number resonates with the audience because of its public acknowledgment that private conversations and deals have always been a part of politics and commerce.

Both of us have seen Hamilton , so this scene and accompanying song came to mind for us recently when we served as faculty members in a professional development program focusing on emerging leaders in online education. One of the exercises was to assist the participants in honing their elevator pitch so they could advocate for their department in the rare instances when they might have access to a senior leader.

We both suggested that instead of practicing this type of indirect, irregular influence, the emerging leaders should spend more time focusing on developing positive influence by gaining entrée to the “room where it happens” -- or at the very least, serving as a key adviser to a leader who is in that room. That led us to discuss our own observations and experience over the years and to collaborate on these articles.

Why it is vital to get in the room where it happens?

We both have colleagues who are fond of saying, “I’m just not political,” used as both a self-compliment (“politics” being considered a negative) and a grudging observation that others are generally more aware of and effective at navigating organizational politics. To those colleagues, the “room where it happens” connotes shady deals made in a cigar-filled back room.

But the truth is that no organization makes all its decisions in public forums. There may be public discussion, but the final decision must be made by a smaller decision group or even an individual leader, after taking wide input into account. Based on human and financial resource constraints, only some of the many projects a university hopes to complete can be prioritized and funded. That is a reality. And it is equally a reality that being able to influence decision makers consistently and effectively is part of a professional’s role.

Some people may be uncomfortable negotiating this delicate balance of positive intentions to gain influence for the benefit of a program or organization with the potential negative perceptions of manipulation. On the contrary, we believe that it is crucial for effective leaders to understand the powerful coalitions and alliances that one must navigate in order to be successful and to advocate for their department or program.

Is Influence Good or Bad?

We consider influence to be one’s ability, through behaviors and actions, to impact decisions and decision makers in an organization. The more influence a leader has, the more that person is able to have a hand in making strategic decisions and setting top priorities for the organization.

Influence is a neutral force, in our way of thinking. It is a fact of social life that we are influenced every day and that we influence others every day, as well. Some influences can be considered good (e.g., my friend urges me to join a gym with him) and some bad (e.g., another friend encourages me to eat doughnuts with her). But many attempts at influence are not motivated by purely good or evil intent. In most cases influence tactics are used to advocate for two or more potentially positive individuals or projects: one candidate over another; one social program instead of another; one charitable cause rather than another.

It is quaint to believe that good ideas or causes will simply emerge on their own merits, but they won’t. As an example, society cognitively understood for a long time the deleterious effects of smoking. Yet, even as cigarette packs carried warnings of the deadly link to cancer, smoking was still considered “cool” for a number of years. Today, however, thanks to a series of influence strategies intended to change the public’s attitudes and behaviors regarding smoking, the number of smokers has dwindled significantly. Likewise, we see many more people now using their seat belts as a result of public advertising campaigns to buckle up. We live in an influence-driven world.

Therefore, the real question isn’t whether influence is good or bad. Instead, it is “Do we understand how influence occurs, and are we able to use it on behalf of our cause?” Make no mistake: even when we don’t understand influence mechanisms or don’t wish to use them, they are still impacting us. By not using them, we are not necessarily on a higher moral ground; we are just less likely to be effective. It is to our benefit to understand such behaviors, their likely result and how to use them to further our cause.

A Framework for Influence

The topic of influence has been an active area of investigation among social-science researchers for decades. Robert Cialdini, professor emeritus of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University, wrote the most readable compilation of this work in Influence: Science and Practice . Based on the research literature as well as his observational studies of those who influence others for a living, Cialdini identified general categories of influence norms and how people might use them with intention. For our purposes, we believe five are of particular value in higher education:

• Reciprocation: the tendency for individuals to repay what another person has provided at an earlier time, such as serving as a reference for someone who mentored you in a previous position.
• Commitment and consistency: the tendency for individuals to remain consistent with what they have committed to, such as when a leader provides funds for a new HR training unit, even when budgets are tight, based on a strategic planning goal of improving employee morale.
• Social proof: the tendency for individuals to look to others for validation of their choices, such as when a dean of a college asks for advice from a colleague about the pending choice to adopt a new learning management system.
• Liking: the tendency for individuals to say yes to those whom they know and like, such as when a faculty member agrees to teach online for the first time with a colleague they have known for years and have co-taught with in the live classroom.
• Scarcity: the tendency for individuals to value what is less available, such as the value placed on gaining tenure or a coveted sabbatical.

Cialdini adds an important point about the digital age. Decision makers today suffer from an overabundance of information that creates cognitive overload. Concomitantly, they have less time to make decisions, and so take more cognitive shortcuts in their decision making. Leaders must generally rely on one hopefully reliable source of information. We would argue that especially under these conditions, becoming influential involves being a main source of reliable information to decision makers -- if you are not yet a top decision maker yourself.

The Lack of Influence Development

Especially in higher education, we are uncomfortable talking about influence and how to gain it. Yet we spend much of our career learning the hard way that, without it, we are not very effective. The fact is that academe fails to help those early in their career determine how much influence they may want to have and to develop specific strategies to gain influence.

How do newer professionals learn that each role has a different level of influence within the organization? Generally, they learn through trial and error. We fail to tell younger professionals to determine the level of influence they wish to have. If they have less influence than they want, they will be frustrated; if they have more than they want, they will be overwhelmed.

We’ve mentored many professionals who are frustrated with aspects of their job they cannot change and try to find solutions to these conditions, but to no avail. We find ourselves increasingly counseling them to understand the limits of their influence and to either find ways to increase their influence or find a new position where they are likely to have a greater opportunity to exert it.

In a follow-up essay, we will describe some of the specific ways that professionals can gain more influence in -- or, at least, very near to -- the “room where it happens.”

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Leadership and Influence Essay – Chevening Scholarship Application

• Post author By JB English
• Post date September 19, 2020

If you prefer a video, you can watch this YouTube video below:

Welcome back! Let’s look closely at the Leadership and Influence essay.

Another common question that I didn’t mention in the previous blog is “What kinds of awardees is Chevening looking for?” Here is their official answer:

“Whilst there is no ‘typical’ Chevening Scholar, we are looking for the kind of people who have the passion, ideas, and influence to provide the solutions and leadership needed to create a better future.”

I left this question to the end because this is what the essays are all about. The essays are the most important pieces of your application. That’s why I am going to focus on the essays and interview in these blog series. There are four essays in the Chevening application: Leadership and Influence, Networking, Study in the UK, and Career Plans.

In today’s post, I want to share how I answered the first essay Leadership and Influence. Here is the full instruction:

“Chevening is looking for individuals that will be  future leaders or influencers  in their home countries. Explain how you meet this requirement, using clear examples of your own leadership and influencing skills to support your answer.(Minimum word count: 50 words, maximum word count: 500 words)”

When answering this question, I thought of two of my best achievements where I used my leadership and influencing skills. I then used the STAR technique to write about each achievement. The STAR approach is an effective way to structure my writing. It stands for S ituation, T ask, A ction, and R esult.

In this part, I described the general situation: what it was, what year, where it happened, and what role I took.

Then, I described what I tried to achieve.

In this section, I started to describe how I used my leadership skills to achieve the goal of my project. I tried to be specific by providing vivid examples.

Here I mentioned the improvement that happened in relation to my action.

Have a look at my paragraph example below. Pay attention to the color codes as they match with the STAR description above.

“In 2014, along with my colleagues, I started XXX project, a free English program, around the YYY School, an international school focused on sustainability education. XXX project uses English as a tool to overcome the language barrier between local and international communities so we can solve environmental problems together. At the beginning of the program, I worked with eight local schools and various teachers in the area to recruit 90 motivated students to the program. I invited the selected students and their parents to the school for interviews and scheduling. To help me teach the English classes, I recruited and trained native speaker volunteers. By 2016, XXX has grown to 264 students and 6 teachers. As a result of this project, students are not only more informed about English but also about environmental issues in their community. Most importantly, they can help solve these problems .”

In addition to following the STAR structure, I believe I did three important things in this paragraph:

• I described the project and the organization that I worked in. This is very important because we can’t assume that readers know what we are talking about.
• I used active sentences. Active sentences are strong and show involvement of the subject (in this case “myself”)
• I mentioned numbers to show progress. Including numbers is also an easy way to make a paragraph more vivid.

Whenever I write an essay, I always start with the contents. Then I work on the opening and draw a conclusion based on the main contents or reiterate the opening paragraph a different words. I did exactly that for this essay. I described two of my biggest achievements using STAR technique, then continued with the opening and conclusion.

Proofreading

I suggest you find a native English speaker to proofread your application before submitting. I use * Preply to find native English speaker editors that suits my need and budget. I personally worked with Christopher B. He has a Ph.D. and 17 years teaching at the university level. He is awesome!

You can take free classes with other teachers to find the right teacher for you. Even better, if you have an English native speaker friend, you can ask him/her to help.

*Disclaimer: this is an affiliate link meaning I will get a commission if you purchase their services at no additional cost to you.

I hope you learn something from my Leadership and Influence essay and best of luck!

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POWERING WORKPLACE PERFORMANCE

1 december, 2014, influence and communication: a short guide.

by Graham Raspass,

Managing Director, Innovative Management & Learning

Human communication usually has one of three basic purposes: to educate or inform, to relate, or to influence. Sometimes communication that begins with one purpose moves to another.

Influence is more than good communication. Communication moves information. Influence moves ideas into action, and produces an effect without the use of force or command. You can communicate without influencing, but you cannot influence without communicating. ‘Influence behaviours’ are intended to result in action by another party or parties.

Some people confuse influence with power. We can define power as a set of resources that you have, and influence as a set of skills or actions that put your power to work. Others feel influenced when they are treated with respect and offered a choice.

Influence is the act of moving another person toward action without the use of direct power. There are many ways to influence others—some direct, some indirect. Direct influence can occur face to face, voice to voice, or in an electronic domain.

Influence is not a contest.  It is a two-way process that involves a relationship .

Every time you influence someone—depending how effectively you do it—you are making it either easier or harder to influence that person next time.

Effective influence requires a balance between building relationships and getting results. Both are essential to your success as an influencer. Emphasising one at the expense of the other may produce short-term results, but will eventually leave you in a weaker position with the other person.

Overemphasise the relationship on the assumption that results will follow—and they do not—and the relationship will suffer. Overemphasise results assuming the relationship is not important, and the results will soon evaporate.

In the first half of 2015, DeakinPrime will run a lunchtime presentation on exercising influence.

DeakinPrime is now DeakinCo., the result of a merger between innovative Credentialing business – DeakinDigital, and longstanding workforce capability development business DeakinPrime.

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Parents’ Influence on a Child Essay: How Parents Affect Behavior and Development

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Do you wonder how parents influence their child? Read our parents’ influence on a child essay example and learn about the parental impact on behavior and development.

Introduction

• Financial Resources
• Education Level

Unemployed Parents

• Involvement of Parents
• Support from Parents
• Understanding of the Child’s Future
• Motivation from Parents
• Parental Goal-Setting
• The Importance of Discipline

Parents are means of structuring their child’s future. They have a very crucial role to play in their child’s growth and his/her conduct. During the days when schooling was considered to be accessible only to the children of the opulent, those who were not privileged enough to go to school, remained at home and helped their parents in daily chores.

Such children used to emulate their parents in their deeds and conduct. “In large part, we as children are shaped by what we see our parents do and how we see them act. I know that I have tried to model after my parents in many ways because I think they have done many things right” (Enotes, 2010).

But during the years, owing to the numerous opportunities available, parents have started devoting more time towards their work. Moreover, education has been simplified and has easy access. Children have started going to schools and as such, both parents and their children don’t have enough time to spend with each other. But still there are parents who devote time towards their children and try and teach them.

It has been observed that children, who have their parents’ guidance and participation in their school activities, achieve more in life as compared to those who totally depend on their schools. “…is that when parents get involved in their children’s education, they offer not only information specific to the classroom, but likely help in giving children a broader level of academic information” (Jeynes, 2011).

There are a few factors related to parents that have a major role to play in the child’s upbringing and education. These are:

Financial resources of parents

Financial resources mean the income of the parents. If the income of parents is good, they can afford to provide extra study material to their child at home. There is a lot of referencing material required by children and as such parents earning better can provide their child with books, periodicals, magazines, etc. Technological devices like the computer play an important role in a child’s standard of education. Parents earning handsomely can provide their child with a computer at home so that he/she can complete online projects. “Poverty takes a toll on students’ school performance. Poor children are twice as likely as their more affluent counterparts to repeat a grade; to be suspended, expelled, or drop out of high school; and to be placed in special education classes” (Education).

Education level of the parents

If the parents are well educated, they ought to understand the importance of education and will encourage their child to study better and up to high levels. Uneducated or less educated parents will not be able to understand the importance of moulding their child’s career from the early school days. On the contrary, well educated parents will understand that for achieving success and objectives, the foundation of their child should be strong.

Unemployed parents are disgruntled and as such the atmosphere at home is not conducive for a child to study. Children find it suffocating at home and as such can’t concentrate on their studies even at their schools. Nicole Biedinger remarked that “…it is hypothesized that the home environment and family background are very important for the cognitive abilities and for their improvement” (Biedinger 2011). He further continues that “Previous research has shown that there exist developmental differences of children from different social classes” (Biedinger, 2011).

Involvement of parents

It will not be contradictory to state that parents and schools have an equal effect on the development of children. Both have an important role to play and are links to a child’s future. Even if one of the links is missing, it will have a negative impact on the child. Parents can get involved in their child’s upbringing by keeping a constant vigil on his/her school work. They can also visit his/her school on occasions such as parent-teacher meetings, annual days, sport events, social get-togethers, etc. All this will help in developing confidence in the child and also a sense of safety and protection.

Once a child is grown up, the parents can still contribute towards building their child’s confidence and identifying his/her qualities by talking to him/her on various career related issues.

Support from parents

Even if parents are not able to contribute financially by providing the essential tools for education, they can at least act as moral boosters for their child. They can inculcate, in their child, the habit of studying hard in order to attain success in life. Such children can defy all odds and prove to fulfil their parents’ aspirations. Alison Rich emphasized that “A cognitively stimulating home need not be one that is rich in material resources. Parents can simply discuss issues of importance with their children, talk to them about what they are doing in school, or spend time doing activities that will develop their skills and abilities” (Rich, 2000).

Parents’ understanding of their child’s future

Simply by getting involved in their child’s school activities, parents cannot guarantee their child’s success. Parents should be well acquainted with the ongoing educational process and various courses available. Information on when to go for any particular course is very crucial. As for example, parents must be aware of any courses that their child might require before going to the college. There are various pre-college courses that improve the grasping power of students. Further, a child will not be able to tell as to what he/she wants to achieve in life. But parents, by knowing his/her interests, can assess their child’s inclination and can further encourage him/her to pursue those interests.

Motivation from parents

Usually, parents tell bed-time stories to their children. These stories have a great impact on the way a child thinks and are instrumental to quite some extent in moulding his/her behaviour and conduct. So parents should tell such stories that have some moral values. The child will get inspired from them and behave accordingly. Stories of heroes and successful people will encourage the child to be like one of them. Parents can also motivate their children by doing good acts themselves.

Parents to set goals for their child

Achieving one’s goals in life is a very important factor of success. Success comes to those who achieve their aims and objectives. Even though there are no fixed parameters for achieving success, it solely depends on the hard work, enthusiasm and motivation of a person. These qualities don’t come instantly but have to be nurtured since childhood. So parents, who want their child to succeed, should start giving him/her small targets to be completed in a given time-frame. Gradually, the child will be habituated to achieve targets and this will be helpful to a great extent in his/her future life, may it be his/her education or career.

Inculcating the importance of discipline

Being disciplined is one of the most critical requirements of being successful. Similar to the habit of achieving targets, discipline also doesn’t come instantly. It has to be inculcated since childhood.

Parents can teach discipline to their child by following certain rules. They can have strict time frames for different activities of their child at home such as study hours, watching the television programmes, having supper and other meals, and going to bed. A sense of responsibility can also be imposed on the child by allocating to him/her certain house-hold tasks.

Having mentioned all the above factors, it can be concluded that parents have an ever-lasting impact on their child’s education. It has been observed that in cases where parents have involvement in their children’s education, the children portray the following virtues: better grades at school, better rates of graduation, fewer absentees from school, better inspiration and confidence, abstaining from drugs, smoking, alcohol and other sedatives, transparency, and being responsible.

Both parents and the school have to work in mutual co-operation to enhance the educational experience of a child and to mould his/her career. In fact, schools encourage parents to be more involved in their children’s activities because the school authorities know that parents’ involvement can bring about great positive changes in the students. That’s the reason schools invite parents to attend various school activities and functions.

Biedinger, N. (2011). The influence of education and home environment on the cognitive outcomes of preschool children in Germany . Web.

Education. (n.d.). Out-of-school influences and academic success-background, parental influence, family economic status, preparing for school, physical and mental health . Web.

Enotes. (2010). How do parents influence children in life? Web.

Jeynes, W. (2011). Parental involvement and academic success . New York: Routledge.

Rich, A. (2000). Beyond the classroom: How parents influence their children’s education . Web.

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IvyPanda. (2018, November 6). Parents’ Influence on a Child Essay: How Parents Affect Behavior and Development. https://ivypanda.com/essays/parents-influence-on-a-child/

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IvyPanda . 2018. "Parents’ Influence on a Child Essay: How Parents Affect Behavior and Development." November 6, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/parents-influence-on-a-child/.

1. IvyPanda . "Parents’ Influence on a Child Essay: How Parents Affect Behavior and Development." November 6, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/parents-influence-on-a-child/.

Bibliography

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An Essay about Someone Who Has Made an Impact on Your Life

Who has made a significant impact in your life and why? Essay on the topic might be challenging to write. One is usually asked to write such a text as a college admission essay.

A topic for this paper can be of your choice or pre-established by the institution. Either way, you may have to describe a person who influenced your life.

Here, we’ll tell you how to write about someone who had a huge impact on your life:

• Learn story-telling techniques.
• Choose the right person that affected you significantly.
• Describe the representative situation in an engaging way.
• Focus on yourself and the meaning of your journey.

However, it may not be enough to write about someone who had a great impact on your life. You should know some other peculiarities which we are going to discuss right now. Don’t forget that you can always find help here with any academic task.

📃 Writing about a Person Who Influenced You

Writing your essay about someone who has made an impact on your life starts with learning a few techniques. One of the main things you should know is that you will have to create a captivating story. Thus, you should know how to write personal narrative essays , some basic rules of story-telling.

Here is what you should keep in mind:

• Tell a story. A great way to engage your audience is to say something in the form of a story. Human brain processes information better that way. With words and sensory details, you can create a mental image of the person you are describing.
• Be personal. It can resemble composing an autobiography or memoir as you have to talk about your actual experience. There is nothing more moving than an individual story, so do not be afraid to open up in the reflective essay. Talk about the change you’ve experienced after meeting the person that influenced you.
• Don’t be predictable. A good story needs some level of suspense. There are many ways in which it can be done. You can try to tell the story chronologically or go back in time and include flashbacks. Try to surprise your readers with an intriguing essay title.
• Create a three-dimensional character. The focus of the story is not the sequence of events. It’s the character. Provide enough details and explain to the reader what makes that unusual.
• Show instead of telling. It’s a core idea of good story-telling. By doing that, you invite the readers to the scene. For starters, try using dialogue instead of narration.
• End on a positive note. Even if you had to face challenges, tell about a positive influence in your life. The biggest impact might be harmful, but it helped you grow nonetheless. Help the readers to see a piece of wisdom or a lesson you have learned.

Besides, we have listed some quick hints. With them, you’ll complete your essay on someone who has made a significant impact on your life and why successfully:

• Someone’s impact that you can describe may be either positive or negative. A vast majority of essays written about influential persons speak positively about them. However, do not try to overidealize. It’s fair to talk about negative as much as about positive. A person that influenced you does not have to be likable or perfect. It is enough to recognize the positive qualities that made an impact on you. It will help the commission to see you as a thinking and just person.
• Be as specific as possible. Describe a particular incident that explains this person’s impact on you. You have to describe the qualities of the person through the actual events that took place and the overall environment. However, remember that the story is also about you and how the person influenced you. Be specific about your growth and journey. The essay is the best way to demonstrate your thoughts and personality.
• The main character of your essay might be someone you do not know personally. Stay truthful and honest to yourself. If someone who has made an impact on your life is a person you have never met, write about it. You could talk about your grandparent whose story you’ve heard or an author of your favorite book. Describe how a person that you’ve met on social media and the friendship with them changed you.

Whoever it is that inspired you, remember that the essay is also about you. It is not the best practice to talk about celebrities, though. You might appear as a fan and not as a thinker.

🎯 College Application Essay

Why are you writing paragraph after paragraph about the person who has made an impact on your life? If this essay is for some contest or is a part of the college application package, be careful.

We’ve gathered some tips on writing an application essay:

• Construct a story. Every story should have a good beginning, a middle, and an end. The first paragraph should serve as an introduction to your information. At the same time, leave the last section for the conclusion. The middle part is where you describe the events in your account.
• Outline it. To make every paragraph count, you should create an outline. It will help you to understand what you want to say in each particular moment in your story. As well as stay on track and coherently describe the incident in your essay.
• Provide examples. They can help you prove your point and demonstrate your role model’s qualities. Instead of saying my father is a generous person, you can find an example in which he showed generosity. These parts should always lead back to you. The goal here is to show how their good conduct influenced your life decisions.
• Be honest. Staying true to who you are is essential. Read successful college essay examples if you’re not sure about it. After all, the paper is not about the role model, but it is about the influence. Try to write something that will be creative and unique. Honesty is the key to reach your reader’s heart.
• Ask someone to read it. Once you finish, ask a friend or a relative for their honest feedback. They can evaluate the content, the grammar, the readability, and the style. An independent reader can help you to improve all of these points.
• Don’t include the prompt. Remember that the admissions committee will receive hundreds of essays on this subject. Do not repeat standard templates and writing prompts. Your goal is to stand out from the crowd, and the only way to do it is by writing something meaningful and personal.

Most importantly:

You will have a particular word limit. It means you need to be very precise and clear when writing your essay on the person who has had the greatest impact on your life. You should be able to express the main idea and explain the effects in 200 or even fewer words.

Tips on how to prepare “remembering a person” essays can also be useful for your task. Look up successful someone who has impacted your life essay examples as well.

Who Has Made a Significant Impact in Your Life & Why: Essay Example

Every person has a unique character that is formed under the impact of various factors. These include the environment, social status, financial status, and many other elements that play a vital role in the life of any individual. However, being social creatures, people are most of all impacted by other people as they since the first minutes of their lives, up to the last ones, they live in society and interact with its representatives.

People Who Influenced You: Essay Topics

• Teacher’s influence on my personality .
• Discuss how your teacher’s attitude influenced your desire to study.
• Describe a teacher who had a negative impact on your zeal to learn the subject.
• How the example of Henri Cartier-Bresson influenced my desire to become a photographer.
• Parental influence on my life outcomes. 
• Explain how a conversation with happy spouses changed your views on marriage.
• How James Brown influenced my dancing style.
• Effect of an online friend on my life.
• Analyze how the example and behavior of your parents influenced your character.
• School bullies and their impact on my life.
• Discuss the impact Disney cartoon characters had on your perception of gender roles.
• Narrate how Maria Montessori work impacted your desire to become a teacher.
• Describe how your vegetarian friend influenced you to change your eating habits .
• Examine the role of your coach in your decision to take up football.
• Role of influencers in American society. 
• How your Italian relatives impacted your view on family and your cultural values.
• Discuss the way Aristotle’s understanding of ethics influences your ethical values. 
• Analyze the impact if your father’s beliefs on your career choice .
• How meeting my best friend affected my life.
• Teacher’s impact on my choice of career .
• Why I think George Washington is a true hero: the impact of his personality on my life.
• Describe how life and example of Florence Nightingale inspired you to become a nurse.
• A fictional character that influenced my worldview.
• My mother’s influence on my ideals of beauty .
• Hayao Miyazaki and his influence on me. 
• How my uncle helped me to overcome my fear of riding a bicycle .
• Write about a celebrity you consider a role model .
• Why Steve Jobs’ story inspires me.
• Discuss how your physical education teacher motivated you to take up a healthy lifestyle.
• Describe the way Jane Austen influenced your love for reading.  
• Teacher’s impact on my personal life .
• Analyze how the example of Greta Tunberg inspired you to become an environmental activist.  
• My friend helped me to overcome my fear and it changed my life.
• Influence of Martin Luther King on my beliefs.
• Why Roberto Clemente is my hero.  
• How superheroes affect modern society.
• Examine how your favorite K-pop group influenced your personal style.
• The role of my grandparents in building up my identity.  
• Impact of my parents on my self-confidence.
• Explain how your mother’s example influenced your desire to enter a college.
• The way Mother Theresa’s life and example changed my worldview.
• A person who inspired my interest in Indian art .
• Jay-Z’s biography and influence on me .
• The role of my family in my decision to lead a healthy lifestyle .
• Discuss how Jane Addams legacy influenced your resolution to become a social worker.
• Why Helen Keller is a person I would like to resemble.
• Analyze the role of Edgar Allan Poe in shaping your literature taste.  
• How the activities of Eleanor Roosevelt motivate me and a lot of other Americans.
• Abraham Lincoln and his impact on my life .
• Impact of my coach on my professional development and success.  

Thank you for reading the article. We hope you found it helpful. Don’t hesitate to share it with your friends and peers. Leave your comments below, and good luck with your college admission essay!

You might also be interested in:

• School Days Essay: How to Describe a Memorable Event
• Growing Up Essay: Great Ideas for Your College Assignment
• Childhood Memories Essay: Brilliant Writing Ideas
• Excellent Remembering a Person Essay: Free Writing Guidelines
• Life Experience Essay: How to Write a Brilliant Paper
• Tips for an Admissions Essay on an Influential Person: Allen Grove, ThoughtCo
• 7 Storytelling Techniques Used by the Most Inspiring TED Presenters: Nayomi Chibana, Visme
• Someone Who Impacted My Life Essay: Bartleby
• Application Essay: The Writing Center, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Essays That Worked: Undergraduate Admissions, Johns Hopkins University
• The Only Four College Essay Writing Tips You’ll Ever Need: Inside Admissions, Tufts Admissions
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The Anxiety of Influence: Harold Bloom’s (not so) influential idea at 50

Lecturer, Department of English, Creative Writing and Film, University of Adelaide

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Benjamin Madden does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Joshua Cohen’s ribald campus novel The Netanyahus (2021), winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is set during the winter of 1959-60. It depicts Ben-Zion Netanyahu, father of the current Israeli Prime Minister, during an itinerant phase of his academic career.

Netanyahu applies for a position in the history department at the fictional Corbin University (read Cornell). Because Netanyahu is Jewish and writes on the fate of Iberian Jews in the late middle ages, the complacently prejudiced WASP who presides over the history department (and whose correspondence is scented with spilled lime juice intended for his gimlets) entreats Ruben Blum, the only Jewish member of the faculty, to join the hiring committee.

Ruben, whose passage from the Yiddish-speaking enclaves of the Bronx to gentile-dominated academia represents the triumph of one version of assimilation, acquaints himself with Ben-Zion’s blood-soaked history of the Inquisition in ecstatic all-night reading sessions that bring him face to face with that which assimilation represses: an implacable, transhistorical antisemitism from which Zionism is the only escape.

Cohen’s novel purports to be “an account of a minor and ultimately even negligible episode in the history of a very famous family”. But it is also, if obliquely, a meditation on the life of its dedicatee, Harold Bloom (1930-2019). Cohen’s novel attests to the fact that Bloom continues to loom large over American literature nearly four years after his death.

Bloom’s public reputation rests to a large extent on his interventions during the so-called “canon wars” of the 1980s and 1990s, and the series of big, public-facing works he produced around this time, including The Western Canon (1994) and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998).

But among literary scholars and critics, his name is indelibly linked with his monograph The Anxiety of Influence (1973), which celebrates its half-centenary this year.

Bloom was fond of quoting Heidegger’s maxim:

The thinker needs one thought only […] the difficulty is to hold fast to this one only thought as the one and only thing that he must think.

The “anxiety of influence” is Bloom’s one thought. It was developed and ramified throughout the better part of his vast corpus, but elaborated most forcefully and concisely in the short monograph that bears its name.

It is a deceptively simple idea, and like many famous interventions in the history of thought, it renders a common-sense maxim rich and strange by pushing it into a zone of extremity.

Belatedness

The anxiety of influence is a name for the sense that any artist or writer must sooner or later experience (assuming their medium has an established tradition) that everything worth doing has been done before. This is the condition that Bloom calls “belatedness”.

His radical claim is that belatedness, and the anxiety it entails, is the central problem of all creative effort. It is therefore a paradigm from which (seemingly) every important feature of a “strong” poem can be derived.

The controversies in which Bloom would later become embroiled already stand forth in this formulation. His theory of strong poetry might just as well be a theory of literature tout court. In this, he resists the 20th-century phenomenon by which the novel usurped poetry as the central, paradigmatic literary form. The many kinds of popular texts that would subsequently enter the syllabi of many university English departments were anathemas.

“Strong” might be described as the book’s central adjective:

My concern is only with strong poets, major figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death. Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves. But nothing is got for nothing, and self-appropriation involves the immense anxieties of indebtedness, for what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed to create himself?

Let’s pause over the sentence “Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves”, because it is a microcosm of Bloom’s whole theory. For Bloom has his own anxiety of influence, in the sense that his central thought was also addressed by T.S. Eliot, the preeminent poet-critic of the 20th century. In his most influential essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent , Eliot declares:

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

Bloom swerves away from Eliot, in part by inserting a phrase borrowed from Wallace Stevens – namely, “figures of capable imagination”, which is taken from Stevens’ poem Mrs. Alfred Uruguay. Encoded in this brief allusion is an entire polemic for which Bloom is also remembered in literary circles – namely, his heroic effort to promote Wallace Stevens to a higher rank in the canon of 20th-century American poetry than Eliot and Ezra Pound.

If nothing else, it gives us a taste of the dense allusiveness that comprises the warp and weft of Bloom’s prose.

The agon of Bloom

The difference between Eliot’s position and Bloom’s might be interpreted as a case of the narcissism of small differences, but this would be to ignore the crux of Bloom’s agon (the ancient Greek term for a struggle) with Eliot.

Bloom venerated the English Romantic poets; Eliot sought to banish them. As Alistair Heys remarks in Anatomy of Bloom (2014), Eliot’s theory seems to Bloom to be a kind of Platonic idealism, whereas Bloom saw influence as a vigorous clash between poets and their precursors that remakes the tradition in violent and unpredictable ways.

This agonistic dimension is crucial to Bloom’s thought, and one of the fundamental ways in which it is indebted to psychoanalysis. It also sets Bloom apart from another important precursor, more proximate but less famous: the critic Walter Jackson Bate and his book The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (1970).

Bate’s book belongs to a venerable tradition of empirical literary scholarship. Unlike Bloom, Bate adopts an air of unruffled curiosity at the phenomenon he describes. His determination to historicise the burden of the past marks another difference. He is happy to acknowledge influence as a problem (nearly) as old as literature itself, but he regards it as having intensified within English poetry from about the time of the Restoration.

For Bloom, however, the intensity of the dilemma is a function of the strength of the poets involved in the struggle for originality, and the strength of their precursors. The empirical exercise of source-hunting can be applied indifferently to any writer, but the analysis of influence in the Bloomian sense will tend to yield better results in the case of “strong” poets – and strong poets are those in whose work the battle with their mighty precursors is most marked.

There is an undeniable risk of circularity here. The Bloomian procedure only operates upon a canon that only the Bloomian procedure can be counted on to identify.

Odd one out

The transhistorical dimension of Bloom’s thought is a reminder of the ambitions of literary theory in the early 1970s. When he published The Anxiety of Influence, the humanities were in the throes of the “linguistic turn” and inspired by the latest developments in French philosophy. Literary studies began to imagine itself as affording a general theory of representation, and thus queen of the disciplines.

Bloom was swept up into the so-called “ Yale School ”, crystallised for a broad public by the volume Deconstruction and Criticism (1979), which featured essays by Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller.

Derrida – the originator of the close-reading technique known as “ deconstruction ” – was a practising philosopher, not a literary critic, associated with the École Normale Supérieure, not the Yale faculty. Yet it is Bloom who seems, from our contemporary vantage point, the odd one out. This all the more surprising for the fact he was a driving force behind the volume.

The reason is that Bloom would later distance himself vociferously from the project of theory in general. He came to treat it an all-purpose bogeyman, obliterating distinctions between, for instance, Derrida’s deconstruction and the then-nascent but subsequently much more influential New Historicism, inspired by Derrida’s contemporary and sometime rival Michel Foucault.

Bloom’s basic point of difference with both of these theories was that they undermined the autonomy of literary language. New Historicism treated literary language as an expression of underlying social forces, while deconstruction viewed it as an unstable field of deferred meanings, shot through with traces of all those genres that “literature” excludes to constitute itself.

Bloom stridently resisted the idea that literature can be regarded as merely one form of expression among others and he maintained, in particular, that criticism had no wider emancipatory value.

Read more: Explainer: the ideas of Foucault

Bloom’s work has entered our common stock of concepts reduced to a couple of memorable ideas. The first is “the anxiety of influence” itself; the second is misreading.

Bloom argues that writing involves the unconscious, necessary and creative misreading (Bloom sometimes favours the term “misprision”) by later writers (whom Bloom refers to as “ephebes”) of their precursors.

The Anxiety of Influence identifies six forms of misreading, which Bloom calls “revisionary ratios”. Taken together, these revisionary ratios represent not just a toolkit for literary interpretation, but a speculative account of poetic development.

The first is Clinamen , or misprision in its simple form. This involves the ephebe following the precursor up to a point, then swerving away.

The second is Tessera , in which the ephebe retains the terms of the precursor poem, but uses them in a different sense.

Kenosis describes a poem of humbling and self-emptying, but with an antithetical twist. By catching the precursor in their own act of self-humbling, the successor poet makes a bid for their own autonomy.

In Daemonisation , or the counter-sublime, the ephebe aligns with the daemon or source of inspiration in the precursor poem – that is to say, with forces in the precursor that exceed the ephebe’s grasp.

Askesis , or self-purgation, is the attainment of a state of solitude, in which the ephebe surrenders the part of themself that is most marked by the precursor’s influence.

Finally, in Apophrades , or the return of the dead, the precursor returns to interrupt the ephebe’s solitude. But this time the roles are reversed. The ephebe comes to seem as if they could be the author of the precursor’s most characteristic work.

Kabbalistic inspiration

For all their breadth and ambition, Bloom’s revisionary ratios have not meaningfully entered the conceptual vocabulary of literary studies, even as their governing concept, “the anxiety of influence”, assuredly has. His theoretical innovations of the 1970s have been overshadowed by Bloom the contrarian culture warrior.

But Cohen’s recent novel points us towards a different legacy, reminding us of the Kabbalistic inspiration behind Bloom’s criticism, which became increasingly prominent after the publication of The Anxiety of Influence.

There is a deep strain of pathos in the tricksy, metafictional coda to The Netanyahus, where Cohen reveals Bloom as the source of the anecdote that supplies the novel with its plot. Bloom’s stories, Cohen recalls, “poured forth in that high-pitched nasal voice of his – a Bronx boy’s dream of a donnish Brit’s accent”. These stories encompassed:

His childhood on the Grand Concourse and first reading the poetry of Moyshe-Leib Halpern and Jacob Glatstein: the fish would come from the market wrapped in newspapers (the Forverts, the Morgen Freiheit), and he’d unwrap it and sometimes the ink would have run and lines of poems would be imprinted on the side of the fish and he’d try to read them; he’d try to read the fish and guess the author, from backwards Yiddish impressed onto wet iridescent scales. He told me about first reading the New Testament in Yiddish.

Is this not Bloom’s own kenosis? Behind the severe, harassing master who extemporises subtle urgent proof that the theory of poetry is the theory of life was the bibliomaniacal Yiddish-speaking boy growing up in the Bronx. For Bloom, the Western Canon, and above all Romantic poetry, were his entrée into an otherwise inhospitable world. He was himself a testament (sometimes despite himself) to America’s multicultural warp and weft.

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The Toll Gun Violence Takes on the People Working to Stop It

O n June 25, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued a landmark Advisory on Firearm Violence , declaring the United States’ gun violence epidemic a public health crisis . Dr. Murthy detailed the devastating and far-reaching impact of firearm violence on the health and well-being of the country, noting that is now the leading cause of death Americans 19 and younger.

For gun violence prevention activists, advocates and funders, the Surgeon General’s proclamation is a sad, but important validation of a decades-long effort. It also underscores the ongoing need to support the thousands of people working on the front lines every day to reduce violence in some of our most vulnerable and under-resourced communities.

Read more: U.S. Surgeon General Declares Firearm Violence a Public Health Crisis

One of the most promising gun violence solutions, an approach called community violence intervention (CVI), relies on street outreach workers who risk their lives to save others. CVI strategies are a vital piece of the puzzle when it comes to creating safer communities: They employ evidence-informed, community-led strategies that engage individuals and groups at the highest risk of experiencing and/or perpetrating violence. This work establishes relationships and supports that disrupt cycles of violence and retaliation, and includes neighborhood-and hospital-based interventions, life coaching, peace fellowships, violence-focused cognitive behavioral therapy, and more.

The organization I lead, the Fund for a Safer Future, funds CVI work because the approach has proven to be increasingly effective. An evaluation of one program in Chicago, for example, found that participants were 73% less likely to be arrested for a violent crime than individuals who did not participate. What's more, an analysis of the Advance Peace CVI model found a 22% decrease in gun homicides and assaults, representing a cost savings of at least $25 million. And a 2021 study in Richmond, Calif. found the model was associated with a 55% reduction in firearm violence, including deaths and hospital visits, and 43 percent fewer crimes annually. These results are leading to increased investments in CVI, including $300 million allocated by Congress in 2022.

All of these CVI programs rely heavily on street outreach workers. As a former street outreach worker myself, I experienced first-hand the toll the job can take. We embed ourselves in the lives of those impacted by gun violence to mediate conflict, and in the process, we build deep relationships with them and their families. Sometimes, we still lose them to gun violence. And like other first responders, we head back out there to keep saving lives. But more often than not, it takes a toll that is invisible to most Americans.

Research by sociologist David Hureau and his collaborators from the University at Albany, partially supported by the Fund for a Safer Future, shows just how challenging community violence intervention jobs are. Based on surveys with street outreach workers in Chicago, the research is staggering: 60% of outreach workers witnessed a shooting attempt and 52% witnessed a client die from violence. One in five outreach workers had been shot at, making them 20 times more likely to be shot at than a Chicago police officer. And almost all of them face unrelenting stress: 94 % reported indicators of secondary traumatic stress—which comes from caring for traumatized people—within the previous week.

Read More: Guns Are Not Just a Public Health Problem

These statistics come to life in interviews of Chicago outreach workers conducted by University of Illinois Chicago researchers. “I think what happens is that we become so invested in the lives of other people, that we don’t realize the harms that we’re bringing upon ourselves,” said one outreach worker. “I was MIA from work for like maybe two months…I was getting very violent nightmares,” said another.

“The majority of street intervention workers have suffered tremendously,” explains Kathryn Bocanegra, an assistant professor at the school, in a 2021 study Between a Bullet and its Target: Street Intervention, Trauma Exposure and Professional Implications . “They are so brave and noble in what they are doing, going back into their community and back into the streets, and trying to redefine the narrative around what they do and who they are. But they are doing it without guns and without a bullet-proof vest.”

The implications are clear: Unless we provide health, safety, and economic security for street outreach workers, these programs will struggle to hire and retain the workers who are the key helping reduce gun violence. CVI workers deserve adequate medical and life insurance, regular screening for signs of trauma, and appropriate mental health services when they show signs of trauma.

At a meeting of CVI professionals in April, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland noted the significant declines in homicides across the country and thanked CVI workers for their role in creating safer communities. He also announced a new $78 million investment in CVI by the federal government. We share his gratitude and excitement for continued investment in CVI, and we will continue advocating for using these investments to support and protect street outreach workers. 

For communities to fully realize the potential of CVI, we must build on that momentum and treat street outreach workers with the respect and dignity they deserve. Let’s honor the sacrifices they are making every day as they work to make our communities safer. They pour their hearts into their work and put their bodies on the line to protect ours. And they do it with determination, bravery, and love.

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• DOI: 10.35877/454ri.daengku2586
• Corpus ID: 270621984

The Influence of Return On Assets (ROA), Return On Equity (ROE), and Non-Performing Loans (NPL) on Profit Growth in Banking Companies from 2021 to 2023

• Teguh Suryawan
• Published in Daengku Journal of Humanities… 24 May 2024
• Business, Economics

9 References

Analisis faktor-faktor pertumbuhan laba pada sektor perbankan yang terdaftar di bursa efek indonesia, aplikasi analisis multivariate dengan program ibm spss 25.

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