Attention Grabbing Secrets: Chronology, Vividness, and Active Verbs

If you have seen Memento, you know the power of Chronology, to be more precise – the reverse chronology. What the peculiar narrative does to the audience is that it forces them to miss the loo break. Every scene, clue, or characters in the sequence create questions in our mind. Did the new character kill the wife? Is the guy who is helping the hero, the real villain?

Wouldn’t we love if the essay reviewer were that hooked to your narrative about getting into Consulting or Finance? Don’t do a Memento for any random MBA Application Essay questions, but if the question is what event changed your life or any question with similar intent, play with the sequence of events.

When do you have to start with an Event?

For any event that had a negative impact on you – personally or professionally in the short term, but changed who you were in the long term - start with the event. Getting Fired, Meeting with an Accident, Dealing with a Friend taken away by Cancer or a failed fundraising; the examples are many. When you are looking to grab the attention without forcefully giving explicit statements about your personality - start the essay with a vivid description of the event.  

When should you delay the Event?

If you intention is to move the reviewer emotionally by the end of the read, never start the essay with the event. Start with 2-3 sentences of backstory, slowly building up towards the event. The event should emotionally move the reviewer and fill the last 1/4th of the essay. Closing with a philosophical life lesson from the event works magic in such essays.

Power of Vivid Description

It does not matter how well you use pictorial nouns and interesting verbs, a set of commonly used ‘MBA’ phrases can ruin your narrative. Avoid the following phrases:

• variety of roles
• working with people from different cultures
• polished my skills
• in order to realize
• exposed to/exposed me to
• leverage the network
• develop the skills

Once you have avoided the commonly used non-emotional phrases, find ways to include specific verbs. Instead of saying, “I was fired,” or “I was let go,” write “The security staff escorted me out of the office while I balanced a pile of documents, a photo frame of Churchill’s ‘If you're going through hell, keep going’ quote, and my bonsai plant in a 2x2 feet box”. You can see what a vivid description can do to the reader’s emotions. It makes it real and personal. Without connecting with the reviewer at a human level, your words don’t mean anything. They are just fillers. Most applicants complain that they don’t have the luxury to include a vivid description in a 350 or 500-word essay. We agree. Mix it up. Use vivid description for events, and follow it up with precise sentences to meet the word count.

Use Active Verbs

When you describe an event, action is central, and verbs unavoidable, but one common mistake is the use of passive verbs. Which narrative is more effective?

“I moved my hands desperately around my rib cage looking for the hooks for the backup parachute. I didn’t feel anything. The parachute failed to open.”

“The backup parachute could not be opened by me. I had tried to open the principal parachute.”

By using active verbs, you are capturing motion, and it gives a sense that the action is happening right now. An essay is not all about reflection of events or auditing events in a sequence. Play around with the sequence, and let your focus be on capturing the event with a broad set of emotions reflected in each phrase.

“I moved my hands desperately around my rib cage looking for the hooks for the backup parachute” is a description of an event; ‘desperately’ captures what the applicant was feeling at the moment. ‘Around my rib cage looking for the hooks’ creates action images in our mind. A generic “The backup parachute could not be opened by me” doesn’t invoke any imagination. We are too lazy to imagine the action without the right words. Keep that in mind while you write about events.