Consistency in a Personal Statement
A transfer applicant's personal statement shifts tense three times: it opens in past tense describing a summer job, moves to present tense for a paragraph about what the applicant 'now understands,' then returns to past tense for a final anecdote. The applicant also alternates between 'I' and 'the writer' in two sentences, and uses 'myself' where 'me' is needed: 'The manager gave the schedule to my coworker and myself.' The essay is otherwise strong. An advisor says the tense shifts are 'fine because they reflect real time.' The applicant has one afternoon to revise and wants to know which issues actually matter.
1. Distinguish the tense shifts that are legitimate from those that are errors, and say how to tell them apart.
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Legitimate tense shift tracks a real change in time reference; an error shifts tense without a time reason.
- Past for the summer job → present for what I now understand is legitimate: the reflection happens now, the job happened then. The advisor is right about this one.
- Returning to past for the final anecdote is legitimate only if the anecdote is anchored in time (e.g., That August, ...). If the paragraph drifts back to past with no time marker, a reader will read it as inconsistency.
The test: for each shift, ask what time does this sentence refer to, and does the verb match? If yes, leave it. If the shift is unmotivated, fix the verb, not the paragraph. The revision pass should add a time anchor to the final anecdote rather than flatten the whole essay into one tense.
2. Evaluate the two pronoun problems. Which is a genuine error and which is a register choice?
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The 'myself' sentence is an error; the 'I'/'the writer' alternation is a consistency problem, not a grammar error.
- The manager gave the schedule to my coworker and myself - wrong. The pronoun is the object of to, so it should be me: ...to my coworker and me. The test is to drop the coworker: gave the schedule to me, not to myself. Myself is reflexive and needs an I in the sentence to reflect back to; there is none.
- I vs. the writer - both are grammatical, but switching mid-essay makes the voice wobble. In a personal statement, first person is the norm, so the fix is to make it consistently I.
Given one afternoon, the applicant should fix the myself sentence (an outright error a reader will notice) and standardize to I (a quick find-and-check), then leave the legitimate tense shifts alone.