What are the five 5 proofreading strategies for a personal statement?
As part of university application, some institutions will require you to write a personal statement. As you would expect, this tends to be a challenging task especially since the primary objective is to convince the institution why they should choose you over others. As such, your personal statement has to be very strong for consideration, and one of the stages you can’t skip is proofreading and editing the authored work.
A personal statement proofreading service will ensure that the typed essay meets the application standards. Uwriterpro comprises a team of highly-trained proofreaders who understand what is needed to make your application look outstanding, as well as to convert your draft into a professional, error-free essay and thereby increase your stakes on successful placement. The following is a list of key reasons why you should hire a personal proofreader:
- Higher chances of being accepted
In case you don’t need personal statement writing help and already have a draft, then what you probably need is a proofreading service. Once you hire an experienced proofreader, they will check your work in-depth to ensure that you receive the highest quality of work, which is appealing and meets the expectations of a college application. Without a doubt, hiring another more versed person will bring in a different perspective, and the proofreader is likely to note mistakes in grammar or syntax that you wouldn’t have noticed. This significantly increases the chances of your personal statement being accepted.
- More than proofreading
Clients who need help with personal statements and decide to work with a professional service have access to much more than what they order. Whereas the work of the editor should be checking grammar and syntax errors, they will also advise you on the word choice and expression of ideas. They will go beyond fixing the spelling or punctuation errors in the draft; the personal statement proofreader will also check your writing style to ensure that it is appropriate and consistent. Don’t worry, the personal statement is still yours with your own words, but all potential errors will be checked and eliminated.
- Consulting with your proof-reader
Once you hire a personal proofreading by Uwriterpro, you will receive comprehensive feedback about the errors that you made in your initial draft. Consequently, you will get to know the grammar, syntax, style, and formatting errors that you have made and can use this knowledge when writing other academic papers or business letters. This proves why you shouldn’t skip this critical stage.
Proven Proofreading Strategies for A Personal Statement
Proofreading means that you should engage in careful and focused reading to identify all errors in the text. It is also important to understand specific proofreading standards to anticipate where corrections may be needed. You may ask yourself, what parts of the personal statement should be proofread? Undoubtedly, you need to read through the entire essay word for word. In addition, you have to review the content of the essay, titles, structure, grammar, sentence formation, style, punctuation, and formatting.
With all your effort to express your ideas and thoughts succinctly, the last thing you’d want is to make careless mistakes that will make you lose the opportunity for a scholarship or placement at your desired university. The following are strategies to boost your proofreading skills relevant to the personal statement.
Don’t use a grammar or spelling tool
There is a long list of available tools that are available for proofreading and editing work. While these can be functional and will help you identify common errors, they cannot replace a human personal statement proofreader. Some errors require you to personally read and determine whether the sentence makes sense, and if it follows the instructions. The problem with these tools is that all the detected errors are not actually mistakes: you have to use your judgment to determine if the error warrants correction. Still, it is important to acknowledge that those tools are quite functional and can easily detect spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors. Also, they can assist you to note a wider range of mistakes. Ultimately, we recommend that you can use those tools for basic proofreading and editing, but they are not perfect and require your intervention.
Take a break before proofreading
If you have just completed writing the personal statement, it is not recommended that you should begin the actual proofreading immediately. Your brain must be fresh so you can identify even minor errors. After you complete the first draft, take a break or a stroll to clear your mind. Once you’re ready with the printed personal statement, take a pen and begin reading the work. At this stage, act as if you’re a teacher marking the essay to ensure that you don’t assume any errors. To boost your concentration, you may even move to a new location where the environment is conducive and without distractions so you can channel all your energy into reading. The point is to signal your mind to think differently and focus completely on proofreading the authored work.
Clear structure
Part of proofreading the personal statement requires that you check the structure of the written piece. In terms of the overall structure, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
- Does my personal statement have a clear introduction, describing the reasons why I want to take this course?
- Does the statement highlight my academic achievements to justify why I should be chosen to undertake the program?
- Does the statement describe some of my extracurricular activities that would be relevant for the program or institution?
- Is the order of paragraphs logical?
- Does each paragraph discuss a complete idea and are there transitions?
- Is there any missing content or supporting paragraphs to make the personal statement whole and comprehensible?
Clarity and Style
A key step when proofreading my personal statement is to examine the style and tone. Normally, you have to read the statement severally to understand how you have expressed yourself throughout the entire essay. As you ask yourself the following questions, consider changing some words to improve the reading experience or altering the sentence structure to ensure that it matches the content of the entire application.
- Are there terms used in the statement that would be difficult for the reader to understand?
- Is the meaning of each sentence clear with no ambiguity?
- Are the words chosen in the statement the most appropriate to express the intended ideas?
- Is the tone used in the statement consistent and appropriate for a formal paper to be read by the university commission?
- Have you used any unnecessary phrases that would be seen as being present to merely increase the word count, such as “in order to”?
- Have you used a mixture of sentences; from simple to compound sentences with varying lengths?
Common List of Mistakes
Undoubtedly, no one knows you better than yourself. You certainly understand your strengths and weaknesses, including the areas where you are likely to make mistakes during the writing process. Since you already know the common errors that you are prone to make, be keen to identify these errors when proofreading. Here is a list of some of the common ones made by writers frequently:
- Am vs. I’m
- Principle vs. principal
- Organize vs. organise (be keen on whether you’re writing American English which uses ‘-ze’ versus British English which uses ‘-se’.
- There, their, and they’re
- Dangling modifiers
- Its vs. it’s
- Use active voice when writing the personal statement
- Make correct use of colons and semi-colons
- Ensure that the tenses are consistent (avoid switching from present to future tense)
- Ensure that the verbs agree with the subject
Typically, a personal statement needn’t be too long and proofreading can be done quickly. However, reading through the work the first time is not a guarantee that it is free from errors. You should check these errors as you may easily fail to notice them.
Read backwards
When proofreading your own work, your brain can easily trick you into thinking that the spelling is correct based on the content of the entire sentence. This means that you are likely to assume that a word you’re expecting is accurate and ought to appear at that point. To solve this problem, the best technique is to read paragraphs backwards, right from the final word in the paragraph moving up to the first one. If you use this approach, you can be sure of identifying all misspelled words or unclear sentence structures.
Summary
As you proofread and edit your personal statement, it is important that you check grammar, syntax, punctuation, and spelling errors. Even as you employ these strategies, it is recommended that you hand your statement to another person to help you clarify and check for further errors. If you’re considering looking for personal statement proofreading services, get in touch with us and an expert editor will help you convert your draft into a professionally authored piece with appropriate style and tone.