A poorly written statement says a lot about you as an individual. Spelling mistakes show carelessness as admission tutors assume you have been instructed to spend a considerable amount of time perfecting your personal statement, so make sure you check spelling and grammar thoroughly.

The presentation of the personal statement is crucial because it demonstrates your ability to use the English language correctly and shows the admissions tutors that you are of a high enough standard to carry on education and gain acceptance into university. When writing your UCAS personal statement it is essential that your English is good. Nothing gives you away or lets you down so much in your personal statement as poor and inaccurate English expression. Most degree courses, of course, include some element of essay writing or reporting, so that the powers of English expression you show in your UCAS personal statement are an important indicator to the admissions tutor of how you will cope with the demands of the course.

This video from the University of Leicester gives a very good outline as to what the format and content of your personal statement should have:

Advice is invaluable, but, in any case, it is a good idea to let someone else have a look at your personal statement before you finalise it. If your reader finds difficulty in understanding what you are saying, then so will the admissions tutor of your chosen course. The spelling and grammar checkers in Word will pick up some errors, but it is not a good idea to depend totally on this, as the spell check will not highlight any words which are spelled correctly even if they are the wrong word (e.g. bear/bare confusions and the like) and some of the grammar questioning is rather odd.

Your UCAS personal statement is a sort of formal essay, and the style should be appropriate to this purpose. Avoid slang and make sure you are writing in the right register, or voice. Try to avoid the clichs which are so easily available to the personal statement writer, because they will bore the admissions tutor and he will ignore what you are trying to say. Avoidthe beginning which says “I have been fascinated by pathology since I was very young”, since it probably isn’t true and is quite uninformative. In fact, tell the truth about why you are interested in a subject. Perhaps the word “fascinated” is best avoided in describing your interest in a subject since it sound like a gross exaggeration. When describing your own qualities try to avoid the overworked notion of “good team player”. (In reality, many people are not good at working with others, and most of the great innovations in human culture have emerged from the individual brain and effort.) Say something like “I work efficiently with others, but I have the confidence in my own judgement to be equally happy working on my own”. Every UCAS personal statement your admissions tutor reads, probably, will include the claim that the candidate is a good team member, so do your best to avoid the obvious.

You have to remember too that you have quite a limited space to say what you want. The UCAS personal statement rule is that you must not exceed 4000 characters. This is the same as 47 lines of text. You do not have to use all the space provided but it is advisable to utilise as much as you can to demonstrate your attributes clearly. When you save text, the system willtell you your word count and how many characters you have used. You cannot use any formatting on the system when entering your personal statement and the UCAS site will automatically remove it.

4000 characters is the maximum amount of text you can squash into the space available on the form, but it is also a way of disciplining your writing in your UCAS personal statement so that you have to order and structure what you say and select only the most important information from your various experiences and lists of qualities which the admissions tutor needs to know. UCAS suggest that the best way to ensure you enter your personal statement correctly is to prepare your personal statement offline using a word-processing package and copy and paste it into the space allocated.

What makes a good personal statement?

One of the most important purposes that a good personal statement serves, and one that is often overlooked in online advice about how to write personal statements, is in creating a narrative of what you have achieved in the past, where you are now and how your prospective university course will fit into your future plans. This is a writing technique that students are advised by their tutors to use when applying for postgraduate degrees (whether masters of PhD), but universities will be equally impressed to see it in the personal statements of potential undergraduates. A personal statement that does this will show you as a driven individual who is fully aware of how their university education will compliment and shape the direction of their future career. Remember, this does not set your future in stone! It simply shows to the admissions tutor that you have not just chosen this course on a whim, but that you are serious and dedicated to it and that you understand how it will work to your future advantage.

The importance of a good personal statement is derived from the fact that it is ‘personal’. It is the single aspect of the application process not determined by strict academic achievement and commendation, but by individuality and creativity – so with this in mind, experiment with it and enjoy the rare freedom!

Why is a good personal statement so important?

For many people applying to university through the UCAS system is a very stressful process, and the worst part of it is trying to come up with a good personal statement to make yourself stand out from the crowd. Everyone has sat staring at a blank Word document at some point in their lives, racking their brains for something novel to say about themselves. I wish I could say “don’t worry, it’s not that important!” – but it is. With many courses – especially in the Arts & Humanities – experiencing large cuts in central government funding, admissions tutors are turning more to applicants’ personal statements to determine which candidates will earn a place. Furthermore, considering that the great number of universities outside of Oxford and Cambridge do not conduct interviews with applicants, a good personal statement can be your chance to impress a piece of your personality upon the admissions tutor.

However, the clear importance of a good personal statement need not make the writing of it too stressful – indeed some A-level students may take solace in the fact that a very important determinant of whether they get onto their desired course is not strictly reliant on academic achievement! On the other hand, some students (especially those taking mainly science related A-levels) will not have been required to do any creative writing for years and could consequently find the writing process challenging. Either way, writing a good person statement will take lots and lots of redrafting, and should you be especially set on one particular university then it is also a good idea to craft your personal statement to suit this institution – although this can be potentially risky if it backfires.

Some students decide to start their statements start with quips, jokes, quotes or funny one-liners. This sometimes catches the attention of the admission tutors but be careful because it often dos not work as admission tutors think that you are using the easy way out rather than using the space to write something about yourself, which is naturally eye-catching and intriguing without the help of a joke. The best idea for writing your personal statement is to write what is true and what comes naturally to you. You should keep the tone of your statement formal but not too formal because you still want your personality to shine through. You should look at each sentence individually to ensure that it brings a good, strong point to your statement.

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Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum

So, results day has come and gone and, for a 29th year in a row, pupils in Britain achieved higher results than ever before. With many universities asking for at least one A* star grade, and more and more students achieving these academic heights, the competition for university places has never been tougher. With the added incentive of attempting to beat next year’s rise in tuition fees, the sheer number of people applying weighed against the number of places available means even students who score the top grades may miss out on their first choice.

There are still options for those who did not quite get the grades they needed. If you’ve narrowly missed out, gaining an A grade instead of an A* for example, it may be worth checking with your chosen institution whether they would be prepared to accept you with this slightly lower grade. While this has often been the case in the past, prepare yourself for universities to be extra fussy this year. They can afford to be with so many people chasing a few precious places.

If you definitely have not made it to the university of your choice, there is no need to despair just yet. As always, there will be a number of places at various universities that have not been filled and you may be able to find an alternative institution or course that matches your goals and interests. The ‘clearing’ process, which is also run through UCAS, is designed to match up students who have not secured places to those that are still available.

The clearing process can de daunting and scary, particularly with alarmist news reports and technological problems standing in your way. Rest assured, however, that by approaching it in a clam and determined manner you may still be able to achieve your dream of studying at university level.