Stop Writing Cliché Praise. Start Showing It.
Anyone can call themselves hardworking, passionate, or dedicated — a committee has read that sentence a thousand times. This worksheet gives you a simple test to find every one of those words in your draft and replace it with something only you could have written.
Words the Committee Has Already Read a Thousand Times
Anyone can write a cliché story these days — put a prompt into ChatGPT and it will hand you five examples. Start by flagging every one of these words wherever they appear in your draft.
Passionate
Dedicated
Compassionate
Driven
Resilient
These are not bad qualities — they are just words. A claim can be copied by any AI agent, but a real story with real emotion cannot be reproduced by anyone. Only you can describe the evening you stayed back in the clinic for one patient, or the course you took after a case challenged your clinical competency.
Run This on Your Draft, Sentence by Sentence
Three steps. Do this before you touch anything else in your personal statement.
What This Looks Like in Practice
This is a general illustration of the technique, not a real applicant’s story — use it to see the shift, then run the test on your own draft.
This Is Exactly What Our Five Faculty Members Check
In our CAAPIDUp program, five faculty members review your personal statement independently, then reach a consensus — line by line, praise word by praise word — before anything is finalized. We do not flatter our students. We are honest with you if something is not working, because this is the most important document of your application.