A lot of what we do here is coaching around essays, and today’s post may make some of you click away, thinking it’s insignificant. But it’s not.

Everything matters in an essay, and one of the best ways to succeed in life is sweating the details.

Here are two sentences pulled from a newspaper article about an unfortunate event.

Here’s the headline: An off-duty police officer was shot in the chest. Prosecutors say it was a deadly game.

This paragraph is from the first third:

[T]he grievously wounded woman, who soon died at a hospital was a police officer, too: Katlyn Alix, a 24-year-old Army veteran with two years on the force. And St. Louis authorities soon said she was killed by a colleague.

And here’s a paragraph about halfway through:

The bizarre shooting comes at a difficult time for the department, which is already under national scrutiny after four St. Louis officers were indicted by a federal grand jury in November in the brutal beating of a 22-year police veteran who had been posing as a protester during 2017 demonstrations over a fatal police shooting.

Here are your questions:

1. How old was the officer who had been shot?

2. How long had that officer served on the police force?

3. How old was the officer who was indicted?

4. How long had that officer served on the police force?

Do you see the issue?

Anyone want to comment on this? How would you write these two sentences to fix it? Let’s talk about it!

Saw some rando social media post from some stranger recently which said:

We have to say goodbye to my parents dog and needless to say I’m literally balling my eyes out.

Um…

Not to be ColdHeartedSnark or nuthin but…

You are NOT “literally” doing half the things you claim to be.

Your eyes are still in their sockets — balls and all.

Even if you’re bawling, they’re still in their sockets.

If you’re balling, hopefully they also still are! 😯

You probably won’t be using such words of emphasis in your MBA essays, but if you’re prone to this particular verbal hiccup, then it’s quite possible you’ll inadvertently use it in presenting a story in your MBA interview.

And that would be bad.

Not BAD-bad, as in, “OMG you’re totally getting rejected now!!” bad.

Just more like EEK-bad, as in, “Wow, that admissions person sure is smirking a lot, I wonder what I said???”

If your interviewer is trying to stifle a laugh as she’s taking notes on the things that you’ve said, that can really throw you off of your game.

So, to clarify 100% what this post is about and remove all room for confusion:

 
 
What the mother effing F___ is that second definition?!!!

Okay whatever. You people win.

But just in case you end up interviewing with some Old School Adcom who thinks like the Snark, you might wanna drop the misappropriation of this innocent little word in the way that you have become accustomed to appropriating it.

For the love of G. Now people say things wrongly and they just change the DICTIONARY?!?

Who makes these rules?

Have you ever had someone push their phone in your face to show you a picture — and for the life of you, you could not figure out what you were looking at?

Don’t make your essays be like that.

When someone has a photo on their phone, chances are that they’re the one who took it. They’re the one who was at that place at that time, looking at that thing that they decided was important enough to capture forever. (Or at least until Apple decides to push an iPhone update that bricks their phone and makes them lose everything that had not been recently backed up. Because THAT never happens. Effing Apple.)

Sorry, where were we?

Oh yeah. Someone’s all, “Look, isn’t this great?” And they’re waiting for a reaction and you’re just staring at the phone, trying to get oriented.

Or even worse, they pull it away and swipe to another one. “See?”

And you’re all, Nope, nope, nope, can’t see a thing, no idea.

And if it’s a new acquaintance, you smile and nod and say “Cool!” and pick up your drink.

Well guess what? The equivalence of “Cool!” from your adcom reader’s side is, “Whelp, don’t know what THAT is supposed to be about, let’s move on,” and they swipe left — to the next application in the stack.

One of the most fundamental problems with the essays you’ve written is that YOU’VE WRITTEN THEM.

Meaning, YOU know what they’re about.

You were there. You had the experience. You can pull it up instantly in your head as a memory.

(Or at least, we HOPE you can! If you’re fabricating essay topics out of whole cloth then that’s another problem entirely.)

Most people write about some experience they had, whether it’s for Kellogg’s essay on “growth” or the Columbia essay about a “team failure” or anything else.

For anything but a career goals or “why MBA?” essay, good essays are stories used in response to the question.

And even for those other essays, stories are often required to do a good job in answering!

But for the majority of schools, you’ll have essays that almost entirely are comprised of a story. Berkeley Haas’ 6-word story essay is a prime example.

How do you make sure that your essay is not an undefined blur of a picture for your adcom reader?

1. Start by answering the question. This may seem soooooo basic but trust us, it’s really going to help you make sure you’re writing on target to what has been asked. There are other ways to do it, including what this Kellogg applicant attempted, but oftentimes those types of approaches are being creative for creativity’s sake. Or trying to be clever or cute. Or some other motivation beyond just being direct. If you are direct in your essays, you cannot lose.

2. Include details. You need to think like a reporter when you’re setting things up. Remember, your adcom reader does not know you. Don’t be like the guy flashing his phone in your face to show you his photo.

All of this may seem overly simplistic and totally obvious when we write it out here — but please don’t discount this advice. Add this post to your favorites (see that little button at the bottom? Active blahg members get access to the Favoriting system which is our on-site bookmarking tool). Come back to it later. Examine your draft – test your writing against what we’re saying. Because apparently this is not so basic.

If all of this were so obvious as you seem to believe, then why do so many of your essays suck worse than black jelly beans?

You may also be interested in:

• Another writing tip: Context matters
• Your essays are a pitch
• You need to think like a lawyer
• “How do I make sure my essays don’t suck as bad as black jellybeans?”

You don’t have to care. So we’ll take it back and not say you “should” care. But you might want to care – at least in the context of writing the best essays you can, which means clearly saying what you mean to say and not saying something ridicjulous.

Like this:

Good news everyone! Though shockingly deeply lodged in my ear canal, my trauma-nurse sister was able to extract the loose silicon earbud cover!

Wait hang on, let me back up. So it turns out that earbuds can break in your ear on the train.

Or so I’ve heard.

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) September 13, 2018

That particular thread is pretty funny because that guy is pretty funny, but if you didn’t notice, what he wrote in the second sentence is actually nonsensical.

Here’s the reply-tweet that pointed it out:

Was she a trauma nurse before she got lodged in the ear canal, or because she got lodged in the ear canal?

— Glenn Hansen (@HansenHouse) September 13, 2018

These are the types of writing errors that not everyone will notice. Usually, the thing-you’re-saying can still be figured out from context. It’s probably true that most all of you reading today knew that the ear bud is what was stuck in the guy’s ear, and that the sister only helped to extract it. But technically that’s not what he wrote.

Being precise with language is more important in some contexts, or with some statements — such as the classic Eats Shoots and Leaves from the wonderful book by the same name.

Getting this wrong in an MBA essay won’t be the end of the world, or the end of your chances of an admit.

But sometimes these errors are funny, which actually is funny/not-funny because what’s funny to the adcom is decidedly not-funny to you when you realize the error happened on an app that’s already been submitted.

So just a reminder today — AGAIN — that grammar counts! And your fifth grade teacher Ms. Henderson is now smiling that FINALLY you see the value in all that she tried to cram down your throat.

 
 
 
And the other reminder that EssaySnark is available this weekend!! In case you have dangling modifiers that you need pointed out.