Editing Checklist and Summation
In the final article, we want to provide some thoughts on how you should approach editing the essay.
As we discussed, the business school application essay provides you the valuable real estate in your candidate package to tell Admissions what they need to know: who you are, what you value, and the driving influences behind the bullet points on your resume. These motivations are hard to fake and easy to spot, so any qualitative assessment or attribute that you want to come across in your application needs support with examples, stories, anecdotes, or previous experience that you can cite.
Editing Tips
Carrying out proper edits and revisions is a crucial step towards delivering a great essay.
· Step away. Depending on your timeline and propensity to procrastinate, you may not have this luxury. However, we recommend taking a couple of days to let the draft sink in and come back to it with fresh eyes. Even better if you take this approach during the writing process itself vs. sitting down in one sitting and finishing the entire essay. You’ll often find fresh ways of saying the same thing after spending some time doing something unrelated.
· Editing vs. Proofreading. A crucial difference. Proofreading focuses on surface errors such as spelling and punctuation while editing deals with the tone, flow, and paragraph structure. While both are important, editing allows you the freedom and ability to take a big picture perspective towards improvements in our writing. About proofreading, we recommend reading for each error type separately. Instead of trying to catch all categories of grammatical errors at once, it is best to read and revise several times, with each reading having an eye towards one specific type of error.
· Have another pair of eyes read your work? If your message is not clear to someone who knows you well, it will not be clear to a stranger. Remember, great essays are clear and structured.
· Cutting. Most first draft essays are usually too long. Fortunately, business school admissions essays have word counts, which forces the type of constraint that is needed to hone and solidify your message. With that said, edits at this stage will usually involve removing superfluous opening sentences and trimming the conclusion to a manageable and easily remembered two to three key points.
· Reread the directions/question prompt. Self-explanatory but we want to ensure you have answered the question asked. Most schools ask a combination of career goals, why their school or why MBA now, so be sure to understand and address the type of nuance to these questions.
Hiring a Third-Party Editor
Working with an editor can help you take an existing draft to a very presentable final draft. Editors that specialize in this field know what to look for and will have that skeptical, refined eye that will be very helpful in drawing the central message from your essay out so Admissions can understand your candidacy and what you offer the program. We want to provide a few thoughts in this decision about whether or not to hire someone to help you at this stage:
· Before working with someone, be clear on your core message. Editors help at the margins in terms of structure and clarity. They will not fundamentally change what you are hoping to say (and of course, it would not be right to have your voice obscured by someone else’s writing or editing)
· Be prepared with lots of examples and anecdotes. In this stage of the process, it is helpful to generate a lot of ideas that support your central thesis statement as outlined in the above bullet point. Different stories contain different flavors and nuances of the main message you want to portray. An editor can help you hone and narrow down the specific examples and anecdotes that speak best and most clearly to your established goals.
· Start early. Most editors that specialize in this area are inundated with application requests during the same times of the year since most business school application processes fall around the same dates. Therefore, if you’re hoping to work with someone with a week left to go until the application deadline, you will most likely be out of luck.
Putting it all together
Once you have completed and ironed out all the wrinkles of your business school application essays, your work is not yet done in terms of crafting your overall narrative. Most schools have short answer questions (the ones that are usually ~100 characters long). Also, schools ask for a resume and recommendation letters. It helps to be thoughtful about how these last two pieces of information fit into the broader story you want to tell Admissions.
· Resume. Highlighting the type of work experience that you referenced in your essay will be important here. The resume is also important to show the breadth and depth of the work and study you’ve done up to this point, which will show Admissions the well-rounded candidate you offer to the school
· Letters of Recommendation. Most students leave this part up to chance in the sense that they select a recommender, and have them fill out the required portions of the application. We recommend a more focused approach, which is to say that you should choose recommenders that know you well and can speak to the truths, qualities, and values you are embodying in your essay. It even helps to arm your recommenders with stories and examples of the times you have worked together in the past. Of course, recommenders are then free to write about these experiences in whatever way they feel is accurate, but at least you’ve guided them towards a particular aspect of your personality of professional development that supplements and augments the broader narrative you’re telling Admissions.
Thank you for your time. We hope this course has been helpful for you as you navigate the next step in your professional and personal journey. We wish you the best in your business school endeavors and beyond!
