When you're writing, go ahead and write.
The first step is getting your thoughts out onto the page.

When you're editing, ask yourself, "What one idea does this paragraph convey?"
Since this is a statement of purpose, you don't need paragraphs that convey "X research is good". You need paragraphs that convey "I am a competent person as demonstrated by my experience" and "I specifically have experience, skills, connections, or potential that makes me the right person to do this research."

Content

When possible, provide specific examples of experiences that demonstrate competence.
Claiming that you have a skill is okay, but demonstrating that you have practical experience applying that skill is ideal.

Translate activities into demonstrations of skill acquisition and expression.
"I made a documentary" becomes "Making a documentary provided me with x, y, and z skills that are useful in grad school and/or as a clinician". Many skills teach time-management, especially if you did something and university courses at the same time. Grad school is a lot of work and time-management skills are valuable.

Writing

Make sure you start each paragraph with a sentence that highlights the main point of the paragraph.
Don't "bury the lead" and definitely don't start with something that distracts from your main point. Try not to switch topics in the middle of the paragraph. You might add information and context, but the purpose of every sentence in the paragraph should be to communicate that paragraph's core message.

Avoid introducing parenthetical clauses.
They make sentences much more difficult to process and people viscerally dislike processing difficulty. If you feel like something belongs in parentheses, you should either rearrange your sentence so that clause belongs without them or you should rethink whether that clause is worth including at all. The same goes for sub-clauses bracketed by commas. If you need all the information, consider breaking the content into multiple sentences. The exception to this principle is listing specific items in a list, such as "neuroimaging (EEG, MEG, fMRI)".

When trimming for length, find places where you inserted extra words that aren't necessary for the sentence to function. Remove them. Make direct statements rather than verbose ones.

This video will help you trim a lot from your writing.
This video may seem odd, but this is an exceptionally practical video about how to make writing punchy and direct. Unfortunately, undergraduate courses push students to pad their writing for length and to write in a style that "sounds academic". You want to undo that habit.

Feedback

When you get feedback from a peer or supervisor, review it critically.
I found it extremely useful to go through the changes my PI made on my early drafts of my writing. I would read a change in track-changes, then ask myself, "Why is he changing this?" One can learn a lot from doing this and we can use insights to becomes better editors of our own work, essentially incorporating the first pass of edits someone else would make.

When considering feedback, be particularly attentive to structural feedback.
By structural, I mean moving ideas around. What should come first and grab attention? What are we building to that will win the reader over? Can we tell a story? Should we structure this chronologically or by some other organizing principle? Can we move something to make this "flow"? Can we introduce an idea that introduces a question, then answer that question? Can we start with something to which the reader already agrees, then build to something novel that makes the reader think?

Some feedback reflects changes in "voice".
Anyone that writes a lot will develop their own "voice". Voice is part of your communication style. Sometimes, comments made by others will change the voice of how an idea is communicated rather than the substance of the idea. This often come down to communication preferences. Changes to "voice" don't always need to be accepted. Great feedback should induce reflection in the author, not necessarily change.

Index

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