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the short MBA essay, you don’t have the space to underline your message, so you need to be even more careful about being clear the first time. Don’t make the reader guess. Make it patently obvious to any half-conscious reader (even to a drunken orangutan) what your main points are. If, when the reader closes your file, your uniqueness, accomplishments, strengths and potential contri- bution to the school are not stamped on her forehead, you have not done your job. The test is to give your draft essay to someone else to read. When they have read it through once, ask them what the main points were. If you don’t like what you hear, rewrite it.
A cooling period
You must always – always – have a cooling period between writing and editing, and between subsequent edits, and between editing and submitting. The longer you can afford the better, but it must be at least overnight. (Stephen King in On Writing claims to leave a newly written novel in the drawer for six weeks before reviewing it.) When you come back to your essay with a fresh eye and cool brain you will be able to catch errors, improve muddled phrasing and enhance flow. New ideas will come to you too. If you can stand the embar- rassment, it’s not a bad idea to read your essays out loud to judge the flow of it and to catch errors that your eye misses.
After cooling, if you have written a draft of the full essay set, read it as a set in the number order – that is, as the admissions reader is likely to. Check that the essays complement each other and add up to a coherent picture, that they do not overlap and repeat material, and that each contributes in its own clear way to you message, within the broader theme structure that you have defined. You should also check for holes in your story. As you read the essays, ask: ‘What is missing?’ Look out for any key piece of yourself or your back- ground that you know so well you just assume it, but that needs to be explained to someone who doesn’t know you so they can make sense of your material. It’s hard to see this yourself: you may need to prevail on a friend to help you.
Further drafts: revising, rewriting . . . and re-rewriting
Once you have a first draft, you’re only half of the way there. It is the nature of writing that it always takes much iteration and many stiff reviews to achieve greatness. All writing starts out rambling and wordy. Concision of thought and precision of expression come in editing: joining ideas that should go together, smoothing phrases and improving diction and word choice. Each rewrite you do should boil off some of the copy. The first rewrite should lose 25%, and subsequent rewrites perhaps 10% each. It is like reducing a sauce. Everything that remains will be stronger and sharper. This ‘sweat equity’
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principle of writing applies to the world’s best writers. The more writing seems fresh and flowing, the more hours of careful revision it contains. Be ready for delays and don’t get flustered when they happen.
The following is a likely course of events:
• Your first rewrite – your second draft – will probably still be oriented to content issues: what you say, what you omit, what you emphasize, what you put in the introduction and conclusion, and where you add your themes and message. You will also be improving the organization of paragraphs and flow of ideas.
• By the third draft, content elements will mostly be settled and you should focus on the finer points of structure and coherence. You will also be dealing with issues of sentence construction and expression.
• By the fourth draft, you should be mostly editing – tweaking a sentence here or there. The focus will be on clarity and style.
These are just general guidelines: depending on how quickly you work and the standard of finished product you are looking for, you may take less or more time. You are not finished until you have done a grammar check and proofread.
Everyone needs an editor
All good writers put their writing through external copy-editing and proof- reading. You should too. Not only will another reader find the small mistakes that you don’t register because you are too preoccupied thinking about the content, but they will also be able to point out areas that are unclear (but perfectly clear to you because you wrote them). As the author you cannot ever adequately judge how you are coming across to the fresh reader.
If you have the luxury of having more than one editor checking your essays, pick people with different skills: go for a nitpicky type, an analytical type, a language buff, and so on.
Re-using material for other schools
There’s no shame in it. Everyone does it. The upside of spending tens of hours getting your phrasing exactly right is that you can use it more than once. Just be smart about it. Any paragraph you lift from a previous application must pass these three tests:
• it must relate to the question exactly, and therefore might need serious tweaking;
• it must relate to the paragraphs immediately before and after it;
• it must relate to the argument you are in the process of making.
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To best set yourself up to re-use material, it is helpful to do the application with the most extensive and demanding essay set first. (It is understandable if you are tempted to take your easiest and shortest first.) If you tackle the most comprehensive set first, you will have the maximum reservoir of completed prose to re-use. You will more often have the easier task of shortening and reworking than the harder one of thinking further and adding new stuff.
Assuming you are re-using material judiciously, however long it takes you to do your first set of essays, expect the second to take half of that, and the third and subsequent applications to take about a quarter of the time the first one took.
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