personal statement

Started by HussainGQ
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HussainGQ

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As you all know,AACOMAS personal statement can only be 3000 characters(much shorter than AMCAS p.s!!) Anyways, I need to trim it down by like 20 characters, and I have tried to rid as many small words from it as possible, but taking out anymore would only take away from the flow of my essay. So I am thinking about going against some of the things that I learnt in English Compostion by conjesting some of the sentences, You know how you are "suppose" to have one space in b/t each sentence. Well for a few sentence I am planning on NOT leaving this space ,giving me a crap load of red squiggly lines just to trim down the # of characters.I AM TELLING YOU,this is the only way I can trim my essay down to 3000 characters. The "is", the "and" that I have typed cannot be deleted without taking away from the flow of the essay. Will the people at the various schools who look at my transcript understand, or by doing this, am I giving people the impression that I have lousy grammar (as I am sure this thread is leading people to believe)??
 
I for one have not even begun the AACOMAS application. I know it is much shorter than the AMCAS PS, but do not do this!!! 20 characters is seriously not a lot. Try finding a synonym or getting rid of what you might consider to be essential, but is really fluff (I had to do this in my AMCAS PS also). Seriously, work at it for an hour or two at most, and you will find a way. I strongly recommend that you leave *at least* one space per sentence. Standard English calls for two, you are already pushing it by leaving zero. It will look pretty ridiculous, by the way - and in more ways than one. Don't give adcoms the impression that you don't know how to write basic English.

One other tip:

Assume nothing!!
 
Also, I would have someone else see if they can cut out a few words here and there. I got to a point where I was struggling with cutting out characters, but other people were able to easily pick out sentences or words that were less important.
 
Definitely agree with the others. The one space between sentences I believe is pretty much accepted but not having any spaces would just make the essay difficult to read. I also had a hard time trimming down my essay, (especially difficult since the AACOMAS site counts differently than MSWord) but found that in the end I just had to make my sentences concise rather than elaborate and overly descriptive.
 
I tried to cut down my AMCAS PS for AACOMAS this way too and it DID NOT work! Finally, after a lot of frustration, I took my bf's advice--

(1) List the main topic of each AMCAS paragraph (use one or two words here)

(2) Make it your goal to get pare that list down to 5 or 6. You can combine here if you need to.

(3) Build your essay back up from these 5 or 6 main topics.

Believe me, it will go a lot faster than you think. Since most of it is prewritten... you will end up manipulating a few sentences and really picking out the most important ideas.

AMCAS took me 6+ weeks to write with MANY revisions and lots of people reading, and offering advice.

AACOMAS was done in under 2 hours.

Hope this helps!
 
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