The Twenty-Minute Rewrite: Diagnosing a Personal Statement Under Pressure
A candidate sitting the Bahria admission test has twenty minutes left for the writing section: a 120–150 word answer to the prompt 'Why this programme?' Her draft reads:
'Having visited the shipyard twice with my father, marine engineering became my first choice. Unlike my cousin, who chose accountancy, my aim is to work on propulsion systems. The syllabus of the programme is exactly the thing what I have been looking for since two years, and it is because of this that I am applying. My Physics marks, which improved from 58 to 74 in the second year, shows that I can handle the workload.'
Three classmates offer advice. Ali says: fix only the grammar and leave the structure alone. Fatima says: rewrite the first sentence and replace the word 'thing'. Hina says: delete the sentence about the cousin and spend those words on a closing line about your career goal. The paper is marked on task achievement, coherence, range and accuracy, and answers under 120 words lose task-achievement marks.
1. Identify every construction in the draft that would cost marks, and state precisely what is wrong with each. Then give the minimal correction for each fault.
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Sentence 1 - dangling participle. 'Having visited the shipyard twice...' is a participial phrase, so its implied subject must be the subject of the main clause. That subject is 'marine engineering', which cannot visit a shipyard. Minimal fix: Having visited the shipyard twice with my father, I made marine engineering my first choice.
Sentence 2 - faulty comparison. 'Unlike my cousin, who chose accountancy, my aim...' sets a person against an aim. Compare like with like: Unlike my cousin, who chose accountancy, I want to work on propulsion systems.
Sentence 3 - three faults. (i) 'the thing what' is impossible in standard English: 'what' cannot follow a noun it already contains. Use 'that/which', or better, drop 'the thing' and write exactly what I have been looking for. (ii) 'since two years' should be for two years - 'since' takes a point in time, 'for' a duration. (iii) 'it is because of this that I am applying' is a wordy cleft whose 'this' points vaguely backwards.
Sentence 4 - agreement. 'My Physics marks ... shows' - the head noun is plural ('marks'), and the relative clause 'which improved' does not change that, so it must be show.
Register. 'thing' is conversational; a personal statement should use a precise noun such as 'combination of courses'.
2. Hina's advice is to delete the sentence about the cousin. Using the marking criteria and the word target, judge whether this is good advice.
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It is poor advice, for a reason the advice does not consider: the draft is already short. Counting the draft gives about 76 words against a 120–150 word target, so she is roughly 45 words under, not over. Cutting ten more words moves her further from the band that rewards full task achievement, which is the single largest source of lost marks here.
On coherence and range the cousin sentence also earns its place: it is the only concrete contrast that shows reflection, and it introduces a second person, which lifts the range score above a flat list of self-praise. If the comparison is corrected (see the previous answer) it becomes a genuine strength.
The correct plan is therefore: repair sentence 1, repair sentence 2's comparison, compress and correct sentence 3, fix the agreement in sentence 4 - then add about 45 words, for example one specific detail about propulsion work she has read about and one sentence linking the Physics improvement to the programme's workload. Ali's advice is also wrong: fixing grammar alone leaves the dangling participle and the faulty comparison, both of which are accuracy faults, not style preferences.
3. Give two different corrected versions of sentence 2 - one that keeps the contrast with the cousin and one that removes it - and say which is stronger in this particular paragraph.
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Version A (keeps the contrast): Unlike my cousin, who chose accountancy, I want to work on propulsion systems. The comparison is now person-to-person, so the grammar is sound, and 'propulsion systems' is specific enough to be credible.
Version B (removes it): My aim is to work on propulsion systems, particularly the design of efficient drives. This is shorter and adds a topic focus.
Which is stronger here? Version A, because of the word target. She needs roughly 45 extra words, so economy is the wrong virtue; a well-formed contrast gives the paragraph a human detail that a marker reads as self-awareness rather than a list of claims. Version B's brevity only makes sense if she is over length, which she is not.
The condition on Version A is that the contrast must do work: if the sentence about the cousin is left stranded with no link to the programme, it reads as filler and drags the coherence mark down. In her rewrite, the next sentence should connect the choice of propulsion work to something concrete in the syllabus, so the contrast feeds the argument instead of decorating it.