Let’s talk about the idea of reading sample essays or going through your friends’ application from last year. Is it a good idea? Well, we’re not convinced. There’s even evidence it can hurt you. Them reading yours might, too. Friends don’t let friends… We understand the urge to want to read an essay that someone […]

Hopefully the Brave Supplicant who wrote this email will forgive us for posting it… but it so perfectly encapsulates the process that so many people go through!! After a brief hair tearing episode, I finally understood what you meant when you said, ‘Just come out and say it’. So I got real specific after that. […]

Not even gonna post today. Just gonna point you to this . Really. Read it. It basically encapsulates all the advice that we give (minus the bschool-specific aspects) in our feedback on anything you submit to us for review. Like the Essay Decimator. And basically everything else. Because you said you want to go work […]

Along the lines of “stuff we often say in essay reviews” we’ll offer this advice: Write like you speak. (Not like you text, though! There should be no &s and abbreviations and acronyms and shortcuts in essays.) Words like “partaking” are odd. Do you use this type of language in everyday speech? A less obvious […]

You may not appreciate it, but that’s literally all we’re going to say today. Questions? Comments are open!

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 […]

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat his subject only in outline, […]