Writing Tips

Here are some general do's and don'ts that will help you write an effective personal statement.

• Find a quiet spot away from everyday distractions.
• Brainstorm different approaches and ideas. This activity is like priming the pump and will put you in the mood to write. In the beginning, experiment with writing rough drafts. Later on you can polish one of these drafts or a combination of these drafts into the document you want to present to the admissions committee.
• Also, experiment with writing different beginnings and conclusions. One effective approach in organizing your essay is to refer back to your beginning in the conclusion of your essay. For example, if you began your introduction with the following statement: "My mother taught me the value of staying with a project to its completion."And a conclusion might be: "As I put the finishing touches to my paper, I thought fondly of my mother and reached for a cup of coffee just as she would have done."
• Most schools provide you with a writing prompt--directions on what to write about. Make sure you follow them. If you wander away from the topic, you automatically show the graduate committee or the admissions officers that you cannot follow directions. That is not a piece of information you want to reveal about yourself.
• If there is anything about your academic record that would benefit from further explanation (e.g., why you failed several undergraduate classes, this is the place to provide that explanation). You are allowed to explain yourself and even compute your GPA in favorable ways in your essay. For example, you might let the committee members know in your essay that if you remove all of your pre-med classes from your transcript (after all, you're not a pre-med major any more, you might say), then your GPA would be 3.30 rather than 2.90.
• Make sure you have somebody smarter than you read your paper. This is very important, as an objective eye will catch many things that you have missed. It is also important that you be willing to have your feelings hurt for the sake of writing the best essay you possibly can. Frequently first drafts are passionate and self-aggrandizing. You need a smart friend to edit out the drama.
• Your personal statement should not be a puzzle that the reader has to solve. By that I mean that your writing should be clear and explicit. The word "explicit" is important. At Essay Plus, we correct many essays where the writer implies or suggests the meaning rather than being direct and explicit. This can be a problem, because the committee neither has the time nor the patience to figure out the implied meaning.
• Make sure your transitions are clear; there is nothing worse for a reader than trying to figure out how you got from paragraph two to paragraph three.
• Finally, try to fashion your essay in a way that makes you stand out from the crowd. Remember, in a crowded world it's our uniqueness that is still our most valuable quality.