PS Tip 99: Practice

In any field, it’s practice that sets the professionals aside from keen amateurs. You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘practice makes perfect’, but that doesn’t quite hold true.

In reality, perfect practice makes perfect. You can’t simply write lots of words and expect to get better at writing – You have to organise your practice in such a way that you’re constantly challenging yourself to improve.

So how do you go about practicing and honing your personal statement writing skills?

Well, the tips I’ve provided here are what I consider to be an excellent method for writing high impact personal statements – Other advisors may no doubt disagree on certain points, but I doubt you’ll find any that would claim the methods I have described will not help you improve your personal statement.

With that in mind, if you want to reliably improve your own personal statements, you can simply follow the advice I’ve provided when you apply for your next job or course. If you do, you should see improvements appear before your very eyes.

I won’t claim that it’s not going to be hard work; You have no doubt already realised that writing a quality personal statement is not as simple as it seems at first. If you wanted to become a world-class writer of personal statements, then as a basic pre-requisite you’d have to write lots of them, possibly thousands. Moreover, even then there is a lot more to the art of statement writing than mere practice, for example, career sector experience and natural writing talent most definitely come into the equation.

Even so, regardless of your own experience and natural writing ability, if you apply the methods, and take time to practice, then at the very least you should still nevertheless be able to turn a below par statement into a decent one, or an average statement into a good one. However, regardless of your experience and talents, you do need to work at it, and you do need to think about the lessons learnt in the previous tips, and apply them methodically and in a very considered manner.

It may seem like hard work, and it is, but if you do take the time to practice writing personal statements in a structured and intelligent manner, you’ll be developing a skill that could have implications, and pay dividends, beyond just helping you land your next course or job.

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