How to Revise a Personal Statement Without Losing Your Voice

When students revise a personal statement, the temptation is obvious: make it sound more polished, more fluent, more like the kind of English admissions officers must read every day. That instinct is understandable. It also creates a trap. A statement can become cleaner while losing the part that made it worth reading in the first place. Application writing needs natural English, but it also needs a voice that still belongs to the applicant.

Protect three things first: why you made a specific decision, how you interpret the experience, and which details are unmistakably yours. Many generic statements are not bad because of grammar. They are bad because every sentence is acceptable and none of them feel owned. If another applicant could swap in their university name and keep the paragraph unchanged, the draft is probably too smooth and too empty.

A useful workflow separates what must stay from what can be improved. The event sequence, the motive shift, the concrete example, and the self-judgment should remain under your control. Sentence rhythm, repeated openings, clunky phrasing, and direct-translation traces are safer places to edit. Easydue can help with that second layer when you already know which parts of the story cannot be flattened.