Word Count: Plan ahead and avoid the pain
By Jeremy Dann
“I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time,” wrote humorist Mark Twain. Whatever challenge Twain faced in writing that single letter to his friend, you will face ten times over with your cornucopia of b-school essays.
These essays are designed to be a challenge to writewith the specified word count. In a way, business schools are testing your ability to concisely convey important concepts to a reader or listener, a critical skill for an MBA student. But with most writers, conciseness is not a goal at the beginning of the writing process, but rather a product of several time-consuming rounds of gut-wrenching revisions.
I recommend that everyone manages for word count from the very beginning of their app process, well before they have started to write a bit of prose. I encourage all of my clients to assemble a list of bullet points for a specific essay concept that covers the major sections of the text and also the illustrative “microexamples” that provide the required specificity and story-telling flavor. In general, the word count for this document should be one-quarter the length of the finished essay. It’s just a rule of thumb, but it helps makes sure you don’t “over-scope” your essay concepts from the outset.
In addition, people should do a “word budget” for each grouping of related bullet points. Perhaps the typical sentence length you’re your writing style is 15-20 words. You literally need to decide how many sentences it will take to explain a certain topic, and then compute the amount of words required.
And don’t do a totally uninformative that reads like this: “Fifty words for the intro. Three hundred words for the body. Fifty words for the conclusion.” Rather, your word budget should have this kind of specificity: “Eighty words on how I appealed to angel investors who were interested in education issues. Sixty words on how I screened the first job candidates by having them tell me a story of their favorite subject in grade school. One hundred words on how I conducted market research using an innovative online tool.”
This sounds like a lot of work, but it’s really not. If you have an essay topic that is just busting to be written, the ideas will flow quickly. It may take a little while to prioritize, but that is a much easier process when the concepts are still discrete bullet points and not eloquent, multilayered prose that took you three hours to write.
Plus, I have to tell you, it is a huge time sink to try to turn an 800-word essay into a 400-word answer. We’re not talking about of judicious pruning or even wholesale cut and pasting. Often, to have an essay that makes sense, an individual has to literally re-write many of the essay’s main sections from the ground up.
Stanford’s roster of essays rarely requires this kind of discipline. That school’s more open style and long format actually is a time saver in the end for a lot of candidates. Cheers.
January 5th, 2007 at 7:12 am
[...] Re: MBA Admissions – thread of gyans Some stuff I collected , better here than sitting on my hard disk Word Count: Plan ahead and avoid the pain By Jeremy Dann on Application Basics By Jeremy Dann I would have written a shorter letter, but I didnt have the time, wrote humorist Mark Twain. Whatever challenge Twain faced in writing that single letter to his friend, you will face ten times over with your cornucopia of b-school essays. These essays are designed to be a challenge to writewith the specified word count. In a way, business schools are testing your ability to concisely convey important concepts to a reader or listener, a critical skill for an MBA student. But with most writers, conciseness is not a goal at the beginning of the writing process, but rather a product of several time-consuming rounds of gut-wrenching revisions. I recommend that everyone manages for word count from the very beginning of their app process, well before they have started to write a bit of prose. I encourage all of my clients to assemble a list of bullet points for a specific essay concept that covers the major sections of the text and also the illustrative microexamples that provide the required specificity and story-telling flavor. In general, the word count for this document should be one-quarter the length of the finished essay. Its just a rule of thumb, but it helps makes sure you dont over-scope your essay concepts from the outset. In addition, people should do a word budget for each grouping of related bullet points. Perhaps the typical sentence length youre your writing style is 15-20 words. You literally need to decide how many sentences it will take to explain a certain topic, and then compute the amount of words required. And dont do a totally uninformative that reads like this: Fifty words for the intro. Three hundred words for the body. Fifty words for the conclusion. Rather, your word budget should have this kind of specificity: Eighty words on how I appealed to angel investors who were interested in education issues. Sixty words on how I screened the first job candidates by having them tell me a story of their favorite subject in grade school. One hundred words on how I conducted market research using an innovative online tool. This sounds like a lot of work, but its really not. If you have an essay topic that is just busting to be written, the ideas will flow quickly. It may take a little while to prioritize, but that is a much easier process when the concepts are still discrete bullet points and not eloquent, multilayered prose that took you three hours to write. Plus, I have to tell you, it is a huge time sink to try to turn an 800-word essay into a 400-word answer. Were not talking about of judicious pruning or even wholesale cut and pasting. Often, to have an essay that makes sense, an individual has to literally re-write many of the essays main sections from the ground up. Stanfords roster of essays rarely requires this kind of discipline. That schools more open style and long format actually is a time saver in the end for a lot of candidates. Cheers. __________________ There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning. ~Louis L’Amour [...]