Lesson 1. Make yourself understood!

We can’t stress this enough: check your spelling and grammar. And then check it again. There are a million free apps you can use for this.This is the easiest, simplest, most important tip we can give you. If you’re a native English speaker and your statement contains spelling and grammar errors, what you are telling universities is that this is someone who couldn’t be bothered to spend two minutes correcting their work. A competitive degree might receive thousands of applicants, so they’re looking for easy indicators of an application not worth considering – don’t let a fixable mistake get you discounted at this stage! Neglecting to remove errors doesn’t just make you look lazy; mistakes can sap your sentences of meaning and impact. If you finish reading a sentence and your first thought is ‘what did I just read?’, that sentence has failed to implant its meaning in your head.

So if you want to leap the first hurdle: if you have five minutes to spare: if you didn’t notice this sentence has its colons and semicolons the wrong way round; go brush up on your spelling and grammar!

Lesson 2: Avoid clichés!

‘Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.’

If you like that line – spoken by Nelson Mandela in 1990 – you’re not the only one. In 2015 almost 150 UCAS applicants used it to begin their personal statement, and it didn’t even crack the top ten most-used openings that year. Number one was ‘From a young age I have always been interested by…’ (1779 users). Things got so bad, UCAS made an official statement encouraging students not to use clichéd lines.

So what's wrong with cliches?

Well, first up, they’re impersonal. Anyone can pull up that Mandela quote just by googling ‘quotes about education’, so all we learn about a writer who uses it is that they have an internet connection. A Personal Statement should be Personal. So if you’re gonna have quotations, they should be ones only you would think to use. There’s also the suggestion, from using common quotations and cheesy phrases, that the writer relies on the expressions of others to express their own thoughts. Which implies the thoughts might not be so original either.

Finally, clichéd writing is just ineffective. We’re so familiar with the words they’ve lost their weight, become hollow and unprovoking. Watch this:

‘As far back as I can remember, I have been passionate about piano playing.’

The writer of this article gave up piano at fifteen and can now barely play a chord. But it was the easiest sentence in the world to write, because it took no thought or effort. The downside of that easiness is that the sentence feels hollow; and it would have done even if the sentiment had been genuine.

For comparison, here’s what American novelist Madeleine L’Engle has to say about the piano:

‘Playing the piano is for me a way of getting unstuck. If I’m stuck in life or in what I’m writing, if I can I sit down and play the piano. What it does is break the barrier that comes between the conscious and the subconscious mind. The conscious mind wants to take over and refuses to let the subconscious mind work, the intuition. So if I can play the piano, that will break the block, and my intuition will be free to give things up to my mind, my intellect. So it’s not just a hobby. It’s a joy.’

Now that’s convincing enthusiasm.

Lesson 3: Get specific!

Aside from avoiding common phrases, it also shows the power of being specific. So detailed is L’Engle’s description that we cannot doubt her credentials; it screams, here is someone who knows exactly the emotions she’s talking about. The same applies when talking about subjects that interest you. Anyone can namedrop a field they've read about, but getting into particulars will show you've really engaged with it. Obscure example time: if you can explain the strengths of Arnauld’s response to complete concept theory, I’ll believe you’re interested in Leibniz's metaphysics far more than if you’d just said ‘the topic has always fascinated me’. Which is saying something, because I have trouble believing anyone is interested by that stuff. (This is the sort of article you get when your lesson-writer is an angsty philosophy student, btw.)

So, dive deep into the particulars of your subject. Slice it open with the lightsaber of your knowledge, nestle yourself in its bowels to escape the freeze of dispassionate vagueness. Blow up the death star of, uh. I’m not sure where this was going. Details are great for showing off your knowledge of (and passion for) a subject. However, this isn’t a call for you to cram in every obscure thing you know. It’s important to be able to sift information for relevancy; anything that isn’t relevant to the topic of discussion is a distraction from it. In trying to impress a reader, you don’t want to squeeze in extra facts to score brownie points, only for the reader to think you’re bad at selecting evidence!

Lesson 4: Strong verbs are strong.

Some of the best writing advice this writer has ever received: engaging writing is all in the verbs. Now buckle up, name, because we’re about to go full GCSE English. Nouns conjure an image and adjectives give it detail, but it is the verbs that give motion to the picture; the stronger the verb, the livelier the motion. Ones that conjure change and movement are the strongest; the weakest are inactive, like ‘is’ and ‘was’. This may sound abstract and bizarre and of value only to fiction writers, but it applies well to the task of conveying passion for a subject to a stranger. Think of all the ways a person’s face lights up as they talk about their hobbies. The eyes light up and the hands wave, the voice warms and rises and falls. No lines on a page can do any of this; their only power is to evoke an image. And an image of passion? That needs movement.

Going back to L’Engle and her piano – yes, again – notice the strong, dynamic verbs she peppers throughout:

Break the barrier – wants to take over – refuses – to be free. This is the language of conflict; looking at the phrases on their own, would you ever guess the paragraph they’ve been lifted from is about writer’s block and piano playing? But while they don't match the subject, they’re perfect for capturing the energy. It’s the polar opposite of dull writing.

So how does this connect to personal statements? Well, let’s look at a real one. This is from Jamie, a PPE student at the University of Oxford:

'In an entry to the John Locke Essay competition I argued that a drunk driver who has killed a child should be seen as more culpable than one who has not. I tested my consequentialist view through debating with the members of Ethics Society, who argued that the drunk driver inflicting harm is simply unlucky. I responded that this maxim led to problems when universalised. For instance, if one driver had a better tolerance than another and drank the same should both be equally morally culpable? This allowed me to assess the competing moral principles behind how to deliver justice.'

Tested – argued – responded. These adversarial verbs take a short examination of an ethical dilemma, and turn it into a framework for the writer’s own quest to making up his mind about it.

Strong verbs does not mean long verbs. We all seem to have this idea (perhaps left over from our childhoods) that the smarter the writer, the longer the words, and vice versa; it sends us all running for a thesaurus the moment we have somebody to impress. It’s all very Freudian.

Legendary essayist and author George Orwell (1984, Animal Farm) actually believed the opposite – one of his six amazing ‘rules for writing’ was ‘Never use a long word where a short one will do.’ The other five can be found online in his essay Politics and the English Language.

Anyway. No, a verb’s strength is independent of its letter count; what makes it strong is the response it creates in the reader’s head. Often this is about being specific. ‘Run’, ‘flow’ and ‘advance’ are better than ‘move’ for this reason; and is there any duller way to say someone said something than ‘said’? Sorry – any duller way to declare. Just be careful about changing a sentence’s meaning by strengthening the verb, as the new word might not quite be synonymous with what it’s replacing!

Lesson 5: Avoid lists – they’re often boring or ineffective…

Aside from the risk of boring the reader, lists can also be very inefficient. Every piece of information you put in a statement should be there with a purpose; and more often than not, the thing a list is demonstrating could equally be shown with just one of its items – which could then be explored in more detail, a virtue we covered earlier. One time you can use a list is as a quick setup for some comparative analysis. Being able to draw thematic links and comparisons is a powerful skill, so show it off! For instance, let’s look at how two past applicants talked about the extracurricular reading they'd done:

1. With that in mind, my reading has included Encel’s Géopolitique du Printemps Arabe which helped me understand how the post-revolutionary context has favoured the rise of religious extremism; Baylis, Smith & Owens’ The Globalization of World Politics from which I learned about the broad context of International Relations; The Oxford Handbook of Political Science which gave me insights into its multi-faceted aspects; Power by Lukes which taught me about the character and obligations of power and de Tocqueville’s L'Ancien régime et la Révolution which was revealing about the 18th century, the author’s own 19th century perspective and parallels today.

2. Outside of school, I especially enjoy Singaporean literature. I discovered my country’s socio- cultural complexities through tongue-in-cheek plays like Alfian Sa’at’s Cooling Off Day, the bildungsroman pastiche of the relatively unknown Cathy and Jodie: The Princess and The Flea, and clever personification of values in Alvin Pang’s What Gives Us Our Names. I appreciated these seemingly disparate texts because of their perceptiveness in revealing facets of the human condition, exploring moral and emotional conflicts, and demystifying interactions with the people around us. Viewing the world through local and global lenses has made me a more compassionate and empathetic reader and individual.

Statement 1 was for PPE, while 2 was for English literature. But which do you think sells their writer better?

Statement 2 is more superior in its analysis; instead of continuing to name books after the first three, the writer shifts her focus to comparisons of them. Then for an encore she tells us how her understanding of them isn’t just a virtue in itself; it’s helped her to grow as a person.

Lesson 6: Mix up your lengths

Writing becomes boring when every sentence is the same length. Imagine if every sentence of this lesson had been written like these ones. The shortness gives them punchiness. But more than a few and it becomes boring. There’s no complexity to them. They don’t flow together that well either.

With their many clauses and changes of direction, long sentences can be equally dangerous; especially if they are packed with longer words, and lack the pauses to ‘breathe’ that commas and semicolons provide for a reader. That previous sentence could have been written without any punctuation except its final full stop and would still have made sense but it would have been far harder and more boring for a reader to get through. (See what I mean?) We recommend a mixture of long and short sentences in your writing. The reader needs both to carry them forward; the long ones keep things interesting, the short ones keep it digestible.

While preparing these lessons, Project Access collected a huge number of personal statements. The number of paragraphs per statement ranged from four to ten, with most people using five or six. Across forty-seven lines, that puts a typical paragraph in a typical statement at eight to nine lines long. But it’s very rare for all a statement’s paragraphs to be even in length, and here we notice an interesting pattern: the final paragraph of a statement tends to be the shortest, while ones in the middle maintain a more consistent length. Why is this? Well, the burden on your final sentence is different to the rest of the statement. They don’t have a next section to flow into, and while you can certainly use them as a last-ditch chance to mention things you couldn’t fit in earlier, they can also be a frame for everything that’s already been said.

To this end, many statements end on an aspirational note:

I am interested in neither pure biology or pure chemistry studied in isolation; my interest lies in the overlap between the two. I hope to dedicate my life to uncovering and untangling the biggest secrets of the smallest units of life.

Selin, Natural Sciences, University of Cambridge.

Or a reason the applicant is excited for the degree:

I believe that the joint course of philosophy, politics and economics constitutes the foundation from which we can create such effective policies and understand their longer-term implications. I would be incredibly excited to be a part of that effort.

Andreas, PPE, London School of Economics.

These final lines are key for setting the overall tone of your statement. So whatever tone or theme you’ve structured it around – be it empathy, curiosity, motivation or the joy of learning something new – bring it to a head with your final words.