Check out all the blog posts in this series:
- Identifying the Ingredients of a Winning Essay
- Finding a Theme for Your Statement of Purpose
- Writing Your Career Goals Essay
- How to Start Your First Draft of an Application Essay
- Revise and Polish Your Application Essays
You’ve completed your first essay draft – this is a great milestone! Outstanding essays are not sprung into the world on the first try, however, so now it’s time to revise and edit. Here’s how to get the job done:
1. Let your essay rest for a day or two, particularly after an intensive writing session. You’ll return to it with fresh eyes, and you might be amazed at how many ways you will find to strengthen it. It’s really important to remember that one of the most common problems plaguing application essays is bland, forgettable prose. One reason for this is that while you know your backstory and the details of the experiences you are writing about, your reader does not. For that reason, as you look at your essay again, try your best to root out generic writing that lacks color and details, such as the following example:
“Although I have been responsible for a lot of exciting projects, I want to move into management, which might not happen on my current path.”
What kind of projects? What made them exciting? Why wouldn’t a management path be open to the writer? Has this been explained? Let’s resuscitate this sleepy prose by adding appropriate details:
“My role as a product manager for a midsized giftware business has allowed me to develop my creativity as well as my communication, market research, and social media skills. As exciting as it has been to have helped plan and release our innovative kitchen tabletop lines, whose designs are based on famous Impressionist paintings, I want to move more into management, which seems unlikely at this family-owned and -managed company.”
Adding details takes more room, but those details make your essay come alive. When you are tight on space, rather than cutting back on detail, choose to write about fewer examples, and simply provide greater detail for each of them. This will be much better than offering a laundry list of vague accomplishments or character traits you feel you have. “Show, don’t tell” remains a cardinal rule in writing.
2. Ditch the passive voice. Using the active voice instead will liven up and tighten your writing. Consider the following passive-voice sentence:
“Negotiations over the extent of the website design were carried out by a team of managers and me, representing the technical team.”
This passive construction is draggy. Remodel the sentence by moving the “doer” of the action to the beginning. This will not only highlight your leadership role but also save you six words:
“I represented the technical team in negotiations with management over the extent of the website design.”
3. Read your essay aloud. Hearing your essay allows you to catch any small mistakes you missed during the editing process and that can be easily overlooked when reading silently. When you read out loud, you will also be able to tell which sentences could benefit from some tightening, expanding, or other improvements.
4. Assess your essay for overall quality control. Now that you have set it aside, come back to and reviewed it, and heard how it sounds, ask yourself whether the essayz has achieved the goal you set for it. Do you sound like the incredibly focused, thoughtful, and energetic individual you hope to present yourself as? If not, continue tweaking your essay until you are confident that the voice you have created on the page reflects positively on you.
Summary Tips:
- Step away from your draft for a day or two so you can return to it with a fresh perspective.
- Remodel any bland writing and minimize the use of the passive voice by replacing both with more-specific, detailed, and active prose.
- Read your essay aloud so you can catch any weak spots and to assess the overall voice you have created. Does your essay meet your goals? If not, keep revising, and enlist an experienced editor to help get you to the finish line.
Taking the next step
Now that you’ve planned, drafted, and edited your application essay, consider investing in personalized advice tailored just for you. Here’s how it works:
- Explore our admissions consulting and editing services to find the option that best suits your needs.
- Team up with an admissions expert who will work with you directly to help you discover your competitive advantage and use it to get accepted to your dream school.
- Send us an email letting us know when you’ve been accepted. It makes our day!
By Judy Gruen, former Accepted admissions consultant. Judy holds a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University. She is also the co-author of Accepted’s first full-length book, MBA Admission for Smarties: The No-Nonsense Guide to Acceptance at Top Business Schools. Want an admissions expert to help you get accepted? Click here to get in touch!
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