My Name in Two Scripts

Planning approach

Anchor the response in the specific question in “My Name in Two Scripts.” Select two revealing details, explain the narrator's choice, and reserve the final turn for what remains to be learned.

Model response

I first saw my name in two scripts on a third-grade enrollment card. The top line read “Rehan” in English. Below, my mother had written it in Urdu, sloping right to left like a cursive river. On that piece of paper, my name was neither a problem nor a gift. It was a fact. But a fact that, once noticed, refused to be ignored.

For years I treated this dual script as a courtesy—something to display at the start of the school year, then tuck away. By middle school I had mastered a kind of invisibility: I was the student who arrived early, kept quiet, and anticipated the teacher’s next question before it was asked. But anticipating is not the same as hearing. When our history unit on the Indian partition reached the classroom, I found myself failing in a new way. The teacher asked what we knew about families separated by borders. My hand went up; I knew the dates. But another student, whose grandparents had fled violence, sat silent. Later I learned that this student had never told anyone that story. And I, in my eagerness to seem prepared, had closed off the space where that silence could have spoken.

Something shifted. The following spring, our school held a cultural night. I volunteered to help set up tables, and a friend noticed me labeling dishes with both English names and Urdu phrases. “What does this say?” she asked, pointing to the rightmost word. I hesitated, then told her about my grandmother’s recipe for khichdi—how the Urdu script curved around the word like steam rising from a pot. She asked me to write her name in both scripts. I did. Over the next hour, five more people asked. By the end of the night, I had taught a dozen friends to recognize their own names in a language they had never spoken.

That was the moment I stopped hiding. I began bringing two names everywhere: on study group sign-ups, on whiteboard brainstorming sessions, on thank-you notes folded inside books. Each script became a question mark. “Why two names?” people would ask. And I would tell them: because one name carries my report card, and the other carries my grandmother’s voice.

I am not fluent in Urdu. I cannot compose poetry or parse newspaper headlines. But I am learning to let the second script sit beside the first, unapologetically incomplete. In my classes, I now watch for the questions underneath the easy answers. In my friend group, I archive our shared jokes in both English and Urdu, not because either script captures them perfectly, but because the space between them holds what matters most. I do not know, yet, how to write a life that requires two alphabets. But I have stopped trying to translate myself into a single line.

Structural breakdown

The opening locates a precise moment; the middle tests the narrator's first interpretation; the final movement explains the durable change without pretending the lesson is finished. The response stays accountable to this article's prompt rather than borrowing another supplement's purpose.

Format reference: Common App: First-year application guide. This model is original and is not an official or accepted submission.