Finishing Strong

We said it once and we will say it again—if you have gotten this far, congratulations! You have (probably) finished at least three drafts of your personal statement and all your other essays. You have thought about these essays ad nauseam, and you are probably ready to just upload everything and hit submit. If you want to ensure you have checked off every box, though, and avoided any mistakes, we recommend doing the following.

Check Your Content First!

It is great to ensure that grammatically, all your punctuation is correct, you do not misuse "their/there/they're," "your/you're," or any other common mistakes, and you do not have any misused prepositions. However, before we get to that point, you will still want to check your content one more time. Just as we started on a high level, we will want to do our final review on a high level. Ask yourself the following for each essay and for the application as a whole:

1.     Am I conveying my message will enough?

2.     Have I told the story I need to convey this message?

3.     Have I been as specific as I can be to make this story as strong as possible?

Even if you have already thought through these questions, do it one more time. You will thank yourself once you've hit submit and you know you worked as hard as you could. Once you feel certain you have got your content down, you can move to line editing and proofreading.

Change Your Perspective

Arnold Schwarzenegger shares an anecdote in his autobiography, “Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story,” about struggling with the cadence of his lines when filming “Conan the Barbarian.” James Earl Jones, though, provided him an easy tip that ultimately helped Arnold and can also help you.

Make the words appear different from before.

In Arnold’s case, this meant printing the script with a bigger font so that the last word on a specific line of text would change. In your case, we recommend trying two different things:

1.     Change the font size to something bigger than you use now. If you are using size 11, blow it up to size 16 and read. You will be surprised at what you catch. (Just change it back before you submit!)

2.     Print it out and edit with a pen or pencil. Although old-school, many newsrooms still take this approach before publishing an article online or in print format. Change how you look at your essays, and you change what you will catch—for the better.

Grammarly et. al—Necessary, but Not Sufficient

Grammarly, ProWritingAid, and Hemingway Editor are three of many, many programs that will go beyond what Microsoft Word will check for. These programs claim to spot unnecessary language, repetitive word usage, and clunky phrasing. But are they useful, or will they miss too much to have value?

Like your English teacher in high school probably told you, they help, but they don’t substitute for an actual person.

Using these programs helps catch obvious errors much faster than you would—for example, if you typed in a comma twice when you meant to do a period at the end of your essay, it will catch it instantly, whereas a human eye would need to read the entire essay to spot this. So as a starting point, it can provide value. If you are going to use these programs, however we recommend using multiple ones. Just like editors can disagree on something, so too can these programs, and checking them against each other can only help. Consider the following screenshots:

Grammarly considers the use of “catch” above clunky, but ProWritingAid does not. Meanwhile, ProWritingAid takes issue with “a real person,” but Grammarly does not. Thus, while using these programs is useful, they will not cover all of your bases. It is best to use them to see what they consider incorrect or subpar, and then use your own best judgment.

A Quick Checklist

Now that you have looked at it differently and run it through some programs, we would encourage you to check for common mistakes. Although many websites will suggest many different mistakes, these are the ones we see the most:

·      Repetitive language. Unless done for overt, obvious reasons, try not to use the same words, especially in the same paragraph. You can probably get away with repetitive language if the words are spaced apart by two or more paragraphs, but even then, variety is better.

·      No transitions. If you jump from a story from your childhood and then, without warning, start talking about your first internship in college, it can jar the reader out of the story. Not every paragraph will need a transition, but if you change subjects or time periods drastically, considering adding one.

·      Misused Words. “They’re/their/there,” “two/too/to,” “compliment/complement,” “principle/principal,” “its/it’s,” “effect/affect”… there are far too many of these to list everywhere, but a good rule is if you have even the slightest doubt about if you have used the word properly, double-check it.

·      Conditional Phrasing. “Probably,” “planned to,” “hope to,” “maybe,” “just,” and “perhaps” are among our least favorite common phrasing. An essay should sound confident and assertive, not hedging and uncertain. And more often than not, it’s more concise to get rid of these words.

·      Capitalization. We're not talking about the capitalization of the beginning of the sentence—by now, you know to do that. We're talking about failure to capitalize courses, programs you partook in, scholarships—in other words, formal subjects. We have seen too often, "I partook in mock trial" when the club calls itself "Mock Trial," for example.

And finally, one last note—do not do this the night before the deadline! Not only will you not give yourself a lot of time to fix any errors you may have, but you will also feel stressed and burned out. We recommend doing this at least a week before your deadline to give yourself a reasonable amount of time to correct any mistakes.

But if you want to go a step beyond? You can ask for help. And we’ll explain how you can do that in the last section of this course.