Most of the editing I do isn’t about ideas. It’s about words that are sitting on the page doing nothing. Vague claims that could be true of any applicant, and sentences that spend characters explaining a process instead of getting to the point. Both are expensive under the 2026 format, where you’ve got a fixed character budget split across three answers. Every wasted phrase is character space you can’t spend on the thing that would actually move a tutor.

Here are ten of the worst offenders, with a real bad example and a specific rewrite for each. None of these are difficult fixes once you can see them. The hard part is spotting them in your own draft, because you already know what you meant, and a stranger reading it for the first time doesn’t.

1. “I have always been fascinated by…”

Why it’s a problem: it’s a claim with nothing behind it. Anyone can say they’ve always been fascinated by something. There’s no way for a tutor to check it, and no content in the sentence itself. It’s also usually followed by more of the same, because if the opening line is unspecific, the sentences that follow tend to be too.

Cut: “I have always been fascinated by economics and the way it shapes the world around us.”
Instead: Open with the actual thing that pulled you in: an event, an article, a contradiction you noticed. Let the fascination be implied by how much detail you give it, not stated outright.

2. “…which taught me valuable skills”

Why it’s a problem: “valuable skills” is one of the most interchangeable phrases in personal statement writing. Teamwork, communication, resilience: these could be lifted from an activity in any subject’s statement. If you can swap out the activity and the sentence still reads fine, the sentence isn’t doing any work.

Cut: “Volunteering at the charity shop taught me valuable skills in teamwork and communication.”
Instead: Say what you actually noticed or worked out, specifically. What did you observe about how the shop priced donated stock, or how footfall changed near payday? Tie it to economics or cut it.

3. “Essential skills for a career in…” / “…ability and successes”

Why it’s a problem: vague enough that it could just not be true. If you can’t name the specific skill and the specific evidence for it, the reader has no reason to believe the claim, and you’ve spent characters on a sentence that persuades nobody.

Cut: “This experience gave me essential skills and demonstrated my abilities and successes in a professional environment.”
Instead: Name what specifically happened. “I built a pricing model for the shop’s slow-moving stock and found weekend discounting recovered about a third of the lost margin” tells the reader far more than “abilities and successes” ever could.

4. “I decided to…” / “I tried to…”

Why it’s a problem: this is pure throat-clearing. The reader doesn’t need the decision-making process narrated. They need to know what you actually did. “I decided to read Freakonomics” spends nine words getting to a fact that “I read Freakonomics” states in three.

Cut: “I decided to read further into behavioural economics because I wanted to understand more about decision-making.”
Instead: “Reading further into behavioural economics, I found…” Start the sentence at the substance, not at the moment you chose to engage with it.

5. “My teacher recommended…” / “I found this through…”

Why it’s a problem: explaining how you came across a book, talk or resource doesn’t add value, and if anything, it can undercut you, because it signals you didn’t go looking for it yourself. If it matters that a teacher recommended something, it will already show through in how well you engage with it. You don’t need to credit the source of the recommendation.

Cut: “My economics teacher recommended I read The Undercover Economist, which I found really interesting.”
Instead: “In The Undercover Economist, Harford argues…” Go straight to the content. Drop the origin story entirely.

6. “Unfortunately, the event was cancelled/postponed”

Why it’s a problem: explaining why something didn’t happen wastes characters on an excuse instead of on evidence. The tutor doesn’t need to know a course was cancelled, an award was postponed, or a placement fell through. They need to know what you did instead, or you need to cut the mention altogether.

Cut: “I had planned to attend a summer economics school, but unfortunately it was cancelled due to low registration.”
Instead: Cut it completely, and use the space for something you did do. If the cancellation genuinely led to something (you used the time to start your own reading instead), lead with that, not the cancellation.

7. “Studying Maths/Economics has developed my analytical skills”

Why it’s a problem: this is doubly wasteful under the new format. First, it’s the generic-claim problem: “developed my analytical skills” is something any student of any quantitative subject could write. Second, the fact that you study Maths and Economics is already on your UCAS application in the qualifications section, so restating it here adds no new information at all.

Cut: “Studying Maths and Economics at A-level has developed my analytical skills and shown me how the two subjects connect.”
Instead: Show the connection happening on a specific piece of work. “Differentiating a profit function to find the output that maximises it was the first time calculus felt like it was doing real economic work, rather than sitting next to it,” something that demonstrates the analytical skill rather than naming it.

8. “This gave me a real insight into…”

Why it’s a problem: “insight” is one of those words that announces depth without providing any. If the sentence ends there, the reader is left waiting for the insight itself, which never arrives.

Cut: “Shadowing an analyst for a week gave me a real insight into the world of finance.”
Instead: State the insight. “Shadowing an analyst for a week, I was surprised how much of the daily work was about defending a valuation against someone else’s assumptions, not building the model itself.” That’s the insight, spelled out, not gestured at.

9. “I believe this shows I would be a good fit for…”

Why it’s a problem: this tells the tutor what conclusion to draw instead of letting the evidence draw it for them. If the preceding sentences have actually demonstrated fit, you don’t need to say so; it’ll be obvious. If they haven’t, adding this sentence doesn’t fix it; it just draws attention to the gap.

Cut: “I believe this shows I would be a good fit for an economics degree.”
Instead: Cut it. Trust the reader to reach the conclusion from what you’ve already shown them. If they can’t reach it, the fix is earlier in the paragraph, not a summary sentence at the end.

10. Enumerating three or more things without developing any

Why it’s a problem: this is technically not a single phrase, but it’s such a common pattern it belongs on this list. A run of activities named in one sentence or one paragraph reads like a CV translated into prose: quantity standing in for quality, breadth for depth. None of the items get far enough to show anything.

Cut: “I attended a talk on monetary policy, read widely around inflation, and took part in a debating competition on universal basic income.”
Instead: Pick the one with the most to say and develop it properly: what the argument was, what you thought of it, where you’d push back. A short list of the others is fine as a brief supplement at the very end of an answer, but it can’t be the main content.

The pattern behind all ten

Every phrase on this list is either a claim standing in for evidence, or a process being narrated instead of a conclusion being stated. The fix is nearly always the same: find the specific thing underneath the vague sentence, and say that instead. It usually takes fewer characters, not more. Most of these cuts free up space rather than costing you any, which matters when you’re working inside a fixed character budget split across three answers.

Read back through your own draft and try circling every sentence a stranger with a different life could have written word-for-word about their own experience. If you find more than a couple, that’s where your next editing pass should go.