It will take another draft to get the final essay as tight as it can be. Indeed, once UUers can finally see the whole scheme, they often fall in love with this streamlining process, with using tense and punctuation as a tool to achieve maximum precision:

What the rest of the world thinks it means to rewrite.

Will it be a stronger narrative to use the present tense, the past, the conditional, or the imperfect?" you wonder. Does this phrase call for a comma? Does this "aside" call for a colon, parentheses, an ellipsis, or a dash? Now and only now do we at Uniquely U. officially permit you to conduct a word count. And here is something that never ceases to astound. Once your personal statement has bridged its invisible gap to meld its buried meaning with its formal structure, we have yet to see an essay that does not naturally fall between the requisite 500 to 750 words.