Wrong school name: Talking about how much you want to go to Wharton in your essay for Columbia Not using spellcheck: Obvious spelling errors Relying on spellcheck: Obvious spelling errors Reusing another school’s essay that clearly doesn’t fit the question: The schools know what their peer schools have asked Going negative: Throwing shade at a […]
Continue reading...($) Improbable attribution
This is another one of those writing tips post that most people won’t understand when they read it casually as part of our daily posting here on the blahg. For that, we apologize – sort of. We like to raise these more sophisticated issues here publicly on the blahg, in order to plant the seed […]
Continue reading...($) WRITING WEEK! Day 4: The problem of the parrot.
You may be wondering why we’re spending so much time talking about issues of writing style on a blahg that’s supposed to be about strategies for getting in. A good set of essays for an MBA application will answer the question that the school has posted in its essay prompt. That goes without saying. Anyone […]
Continue reading...($) WRITING WEEK! Day 3: Don’t be cagey
To continue on with Writing Week – Monday’s post 1 here and Tuesday’s post 2 here if you missed them… There’s this thing where writers start stuff in the middle of a story. It even has a name: in medias res Please don’t do that in your MBA essays. Premium content starts here… ———– […]
Continue reading...($) WRITING WEEK! Day 2: Reduce the Fluff Factor
It’s Day 2 of WRITING WEEK on the EssaySnark blahg! In case you missed our starting post: Don’t cheat your reader. Today we’ll talk about combining essay-writing strategy and tactics. When you have hardly any space in a bschool essay, you need to make every word count. Seems obvious, right? If it were, then we […]
Continue reading...WRITING WEEK! Day 1: Don’t cheat your reader out of a proper
OMG it’s the end of August! September is almost here! YOU SHOULD BE WRITING ESSAYS!!! To support you in that, this week we’re dedicating the blahg to posts about writing. This will be a fairly random assortment of tips and tricks for putting together a strong MBA application essay (today, with puppies). You may want […]
Continue reading...($) A key objective in writing your MBA essays (and how to meet it)
You’re probably living and breathing your essays right about now. You may even have had a dream about your MBA apps. That’s when you know you’re in the thick of it — which is exactly where you should be, with this many weeks left till those deadlines!! The most important thing with any MBA essay […]
Continue reading...Double meanings
These are popping up all over the place right now so we figured it would be good to do a quick post on them. Someone wrote about how they worked at a bank and they had customers who “did not want to maintain high balances because there was no interest.” Be careful of sneaky words […]
Continue reading...($) The “So what?” question
We’ve said before that good drafts are not written, they’re assembled. As you are gathering your inventory of soundbites and examples and ideas and bits of content together, and you start compiling them into actual outlines, you’re going to have to take a step back multiple times, to make sure you’re really on track. One […]
Continue reading...The EssaySnakr
The EssaySnakr! What on earth could that mean? Maybe it means: We are the snakr of essays. Yum yum! Or perhaps we’re trying to tell you that: You will need many snakz ready as you start to take up camp in the essay-writing zone. These both may be true! Mostly though what we are bringing […]
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