The MBA application process is a daunting process, especially for non-native English speakers. Not only do you have to deal with finding the right vocabulary, but you also have to navigate a completely different set of cultural expectations of communication. 

One of the hardest techniques for many non-native English speakers to learn is how to write powerful but concise statements about their strengths, motivations, and other aspects of themselves and their careers. 

While in many other languages and cultures, telling these stories requires lots of context, detail, and explanation, in the MBA environment, you are expected to communicate only what is absolutely necessary in order to get your point across. This is especially true for short-answer responses, such as UVA Darden’s essays, none of which are longer than 200 words.

Although working on your English proficiency takes time, you can quickly master the basics when it comes to adapting your communication style to achieve conciseness, clarity, and excellence, even if you only have 1-200 words to express yourself! 

To help you with this, we’ve compiled a list of the most important things you need to know.

 

Tip 1: Avoid the passive voice

One of the biggest mistakes non-native English speakers make in their b-school applications is using the passive voice. While both non-native and native speakers often over-use the passive voice, as sometimes it comes automatically, this is easily fixable. 

 

What is the passive voice and why is it an issue? 

The passive voice is defined by emphasizing a sentence’s object over its subject. This gives the sense that the most important part of the sentence is the object at hand, rather than the subject. For example:

“The report was written by David.” (vs. “David wrote the report.”)

Here, the actual subject is David and the object is the report. However, in the first sentence, which is in the passive voice, David’s action is sidelined and the reader focuses more on the report being written. 

Sometimes, the passive voice allows us to avoid identifying the person/thing responsible for action altogether. For example:

“My wallet was stolen.”

Now, the sentence leaves us wondering, who stole the wallet? But because the author has used the passive voice, we have no idea who took the action, making the situation a bit unclear.

The reason this is a problem in MBA essays is that because you are trying to highlight you and your actions. Because you want to emphasize your ownership over past actions and achievements to admission committees, you’ll want to avoid using the passive voice.

 

What to use instead

While using the passive voice is a common practice in other linguistic contexts, in the English-speaking business world, it’s important to use the active voice instead. Not only does using the active voice help you emphasize your actions, putting YOU at the center of your ideas, it also helps you reduce word count. For example, consider the following two sentences:

Passive voice: “Once my data collection improvements were put in place, customer satisfaction rates were increased and it was decided that I deserved a promotion.” (23 words)

Active voice: “I implemented my data collection improvements, and consequently increased customer satisfaction rates and earned a promotion.” (16 words)

The first sentence is overly wordy and it is hard to pinpoint who is responsible for the actions mentioned and why success was achieved. However, the second sentence is not only more concise and therefore more memorable, but it also highlights your actions and makes it clear that YOU are the one responsible for the positive results.

 

How to identify and correct your usage of the passive voice

Once you’ve written your essays, you can easily go back through and replace instances of the passive voice with the active voice. 

First, identify the passive voice in your sentences. Look for the construction: noun + “was/were” + past participle (e.g. the report, was, written; improvements, were, put). In these sentences, ask yourself what the action is, and who is responsible for the action (for example, you or your team). Then, try your best to start the sentence with the action-taker – in most cases, this will make you the star of the situation and make your sentence more direct.

Keep in mind that this is not a catch-all strategy – in some cases, the passive voice is OK to use, and at times even necessary. 

For example, if you are describing the context of a task you had to tackle, you will want to emphasize things like expectations or numbers to emphasize the challenge you were up against: “27.5 million Americans were uninsured by healthcare coverage last year” or “$2 million needed to be raised in just 6 months.” And sometimes, you simply don’t know who or what is responsible for an action, or it is impossible to define (e.g. “The company’s market value was reduced by 5%.”). 

The most important time to focus on replacing passive with active voice is when you are telling stories to illustrate your own successes, strengths, and skills, and you are describing actions you took to achieve or demonstrate those things.

 

Tip 2: Stay focused

In many cultures, telling a good story often involves lots of detail and interesting tangents. However, for MBA applications, and especially short answers, you have to get a powerful point across as concisely as possible. Therefore, in these situations, you may have to abandon what you are used to and only include what is absolutely necessary to support your main point.

 

Connect the dots

When you are writing your outline for your response, make sure you are aware of what your main idea is. Then, identify all the important points you must make in order to illustrate or prove your main idea. Highlight the ones that are absolutely essential so that you know which ones cannot be compromised once you must go in and cut words. 

Once it’s time to edit, cut any unnecessary or irrelevant ideas ideas and examples. While this tip is most important for short-answer questions, it also applies to longer essays as well. Even though you may be less worried about word count for these, removing tangential examples and ideas will make your essay more streamlined and allow you more room to expand upon the strongest ideas in your response.

 

Summarize

In short-answer essays, there is often not enough room to provide expanded, STAR-formatted examples to prove your points. To be both concise and illustrative, you can transition from focusing on specific cases to bigger achievements. For example:

“I am a people-oriented leader who values interdisciplinary collaboration to achieve effective results. In my career, I have promoted teamwork between departments within 6 separate projects, enabling us to create innovative new products and reducing the production processing time by 10%.” 

By summarizing and making your ideas more concise, you are not only reducing word count, but also adding power to the words and thoughts you do choose to employ.

 

Tip 3: Avoid overlapping ideas and verbose language

Often, when trying to make an impression on others, we repeat the ideas we want them to remember the most and adorn them with beautiful language. However, this is not a great approach for b-school essays, especially when we are trying to make them as short as possible. 

Unfortunately, many of us have ingrained this way of communicating into our daily lives, so we may not realize that we are being long-winded in the MBA application context. 

Therefore, learning to identify constructions to simplify or repetitions to remove in our essays is an important but often overlooked step in the essay-writing process.

 

Remove ideas and examples used elsewhere in your application

We all have one or two career achievements that we are particularly proud of, and it is natural to want to bring them up multiple times to emphasize them or explore them from different angles. 

However, because you have to be as comprehensive about yourself as possible while also remaining concise, it’s important to only use each idea or example once in each school’s application. 

If you have an example that applies really well to two different prompts, take some time to identify 1) where the example is more relevant and/or 2) which one fits better in terms of word count (for example, if you are struggling to cut down a short-answer response and still have room for more words in another essay where the example fits, it might be useful to move that example to the essay with more room). 

 

Use simplified and concise language

After writing your essay, going back through and thinking of shorter ways to express your ideas can be a great way of reducing word count. 

One way of doing this is by removing words that you would use orally but are not necessary in writing, such as “really/very” or other descriptive words that are more decorative than functional. 

You can also replace wordy phrases and constructions with simpler ones. For example, “in order to” can become “to,” and “I took advantage of the opportunity to join [x company” can be “I joined [x company].”

 

Need help writing strong short-answer responses?

Writing powerful answers within the constraints of a limited word count is a very difficult task. Luckily, Ellin Lolis Consulting has an expert team with the experience to help you make your essays shine as brightly as possible, even in just 100-200 words.

Whether you are struggling to be concise in English or are unsure of whether your communication style is appropriate for the MBA context, ELC knows just how to give you exactly the guidance you need.

Get in touch to discuss how we can help you today!