Monday Morning Essay Tip: Leave Out Extreme Descriptions
Owen Gyles on January 23, 2012 in School Paragraph No Comments »This week we offer an oxymoron of sorts: extreme humility. We suppose that one candidate could be more humble than the next, but one could never refer to oneself as “extremely humble,” because doing so would undermine the very claim to humility.
Our philosophy at mbaMission is that candidates should let their experiences captivate the admissions committees. Sometimes we find that instead, candidates attempt to emphasize their actions with “extreme” adjectives and adverbs—an approach we strongly advise against.
In these two sentences, the writer uses the descriptors remarkably, dramatically, wildly and tremendous to make his impression. We find that a more effective approach is to eliminate these “extreme” descriptions and let the experiences do the “talking.”
In this second example, we do not need to be told that the results were “tremendous,” because the $1M speaks for itself; we do not need to be told that the marketing campaign was “wildly creative,” because this is implied in the nature of guerilla marketing. In addition to truly showing a
