I just finished my first college essay, a 7-pager, since four years ago when I dropped out of college. I forgot just how terrible the format of the collegiate essay is for communicating anything interesting. The formality of the language is stultifying. Plus, the academic style we're supposed to emulate that appears in the scholarly journals requires a vocabulary (and jargon) that is beyond most college students this day and age, at least in my experience. I'm constantly thesaurus-ing. I try ruthlessly to edit out all the $10 words and flourishes that muddle my paper, but it still comes out as boring at best and completely underwhelming. And not to self-aggrandize, but I'm trying really hard whereas I know other students are not. I feel so sorry for the teachers that have to read these.
blackbootz, try Hemingway App. Not a recommendation, but it sounds like something you could use.
It was for a seminar class on masculinity. We read a sociologist's cultural history of manhood in America over the last two hundred years. He broadly identified three themes that popular conceptions of manhood have all shared, namely self-making (or self-control), escapism, and exclusion. Working with the last theme--exclusion as a basis for manhood--I identified historical and contemporary examples. Funny that I'm talking about the paper on Hubski: one of my contemporaneous examples of men grounding their identities by excluding others came to me based on the discussion on the site around Shane Bauer of MoJo joining a border militia.