Personal statement audit

Your roommate says it is good. Your mother cried. Neither of them has read four hundred of these in a row. What you need is somebody who has, marking the specific sentences that are doing nothing and saying why.

Price: $99
Reads: Two full
Turnaround: One week
Format: Written

Buy the audit, $99 Or audit the whole primary

What you get

Two reads, three colors, and a list of three things.

Two full reads. The first one straight through, the way a committee reader does it. The second one line by line, which is where the marks come from.
A three-color annotated document. Red must change before you submit. Yellow is worth reconsidering. Green is working. Every red mark carries a comment explaining why.
Two or three named strengths. Not flattery. The parts that are genuinely working, because the most common way people ruin a good statement is editing the good bits out.
A prioritized top-three revision list. Three things, in order. Not forty comments you will never work through.

personal_statement_v3.docx

Must change Reconsider Working

Ever since I was a child, I have wanted to be a doctor. I volunteered at NewYork-Presbyterian for two years, where I learned the value of compassion. Mrs. Okafor asked me to read her discharge papers out loud because she had left her glasses in the ambulance.

Must change Eleven words, and roughly a third of your competition opens with some version of them. You have not told the reader anything only you could say.

Reconsider Two years is real and worth keeping. "The value of compassion" is not, because you are handing the reader a conclusion instead of the evidence.

Working This is your opening. Specific, only yours, and it earns in one sentence what the two above it only claimed.

Illustration of our annotation standard. Not a client document.

Before you buy

The questions we actually get.

Whose words end up in the final draft?

Yours. Schools ask for your writing, and yours is what gets submitted.

We mark what is working and what to fix, and every red mark carries a reason. The sentences stay yours.

How finished does my draft need to be?

Finished enough to have a beginning, a middle and an end. A rough complete draft gets far more out of this than two polished paragraphs, because most of what we are looking at is structure.

Can I send a second draft after I revise?

That is a second audit. This one covers two reads of one draft. If you would like another audit after you have received your completed materials, we recommend you look into the Cosmos Program, which provides continuous editing.