Have you ever finished drafting a one-pager, report, or social media profile only to find out that you’re hundreds of words or characters over your limit? Or maybe you’re not working with a word limit, but you get the sense
If you’re preparing a personal statement for a med school, law school, grad school, or medical residency program, you may think that you should focus only on your successes. After all, if you’re trying to impress an admissions committee and
If you think you’re a weak writer, you may think that there isn’t much you can do about it. After all, when it comes to being a strong writer, you either have what it takes or you don’t. Right? We
When you write a personal statement for a medical school application, you’re writing for someone who’s going to make an important decision about your future based, in part, on what you’ve written. For this reason, it’s a good idea to
Note: We’ve written a new version of this post with six extra tips. Read the new version. Ever finish a draft of an essay, report, or proposal only to find out that you’re hundreds (or even thousands) of words over
Can’t figure out why commas belong in certain places in sentences but not others? You’re not alone. In English, we use commas in many different ways, so their presence in (or absence from) a sentence may seem arbitrary. However, commas
When you’re writing a sentence that already contains the word “and,” it can be tempting to use “as well as” instead of another “and.” You probably learned at some point in school or at work that you should avoid using
Not every sentence that sounds like a question ends with a question mark. Sentences that do end with question marks are called direct questions — they are sentences that we could ask someone. For example, “Lisa, where are the cookies?”
For those of us who write in English on a regular basis, using periods is usually a pretty standard affair. We know that, in general, we need to place a period at the end of a sentence. In some cases,
Sometimes our writing is wordy because we use more sentences than we need to express our thoughts clearly. Because each sentence needs to contain certain types of words (e.g., nouns, verbs, and prepositions) to be grammatical, breaking up related ideas