How are matures and mature grads dealing iwth personal statement paragraph breaks?

[tamisz]

I would love to know how everyone is dealing with this -- given that we have more to say than the average school leaver, it is even harder for us to sacrifice those lines between paragraphs.

I have considered a few underscores at the beginning of each paragraph but I was told that looked messy. Now I am thinking a few dashes ---. What are you all doing? It goes against everything i believe in to send it off as one big block...

[tcdlewis]

Hmm it's tricky but I decided to cut a few adjectives out here and there so that I had a line between paragraphs. To me, it is very important that the statement is easy to read and in managable chunks. Underscoring or dashing will look messy and may hamper your chances.

[tamisz]

thanks for taking the time to reply. How many paragraphs is your statement? I think maybe I need to do some serious paragraph consolidation.

[Singh.Simran]

I put in 1 or maybe 2 (i forget ) paragraph breaks. I think they are worth the lost line, because they make it appear so much better. And with a ps, perception is everything

[tcdlewis]

exaclty 47 lines after many sacrifices

[yeliab_cram]

sacrafice the lines. leave the space. it makes it so much easier to digest the information in your PS. IF you dont, you are not going to get marked down, but their is a real possibility you will miss out on marks because the admissions tutor (who has to read hundreads of these things shrung down to A5) loses concentration in the middle of the PS.

if you structue it well, and it is laid out clearly, then this is far less likely to happen. Basically, aim to present it in the same order as thier mark sheet; they will read it and go: tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. etc.

[mimx]

I have 8 small paragraphs --previously 7 ( 46 lines) --which are no space lines but all the paragraphs are tabbed 2 spaces. I added one decided I wanted to talk about the little about academics since I have an article published.
no dashes or other special characters.

[tamisz]

i thought that the tabs go away in preview? that's why i had thought about using dashes etc.

[mimx]

the result 400 characters over, so leaving it breathe a day.

[amy2705598]

I left a line between paragraphs (got accepted to Birmingham). I really think it makes a big difference to do so, and makes it much more readable. When they have hundreds of personal statements to read they want to be able to read them quickly, and if they can see the paragraph breaks it makes it much easier to read. Just my thoughts!