Sometimes students will ask me to look at their applications for grad school, and while I'm happy to do that, it's also been 22 years since I wrote my own grad school application and 17 years since I read applications to my grad school program. As a result, I don't have a firm sense on what current standards are for such applications and what qualities make an applicant compelling. So I turned to twitter for help:

The first response I got struck a note that we all agreed on: Don't say that you love to read!

This is good advice not only for grad school applications, but any sort of application:

(by the way, the != is the twitter version of a does-not-equal-sign, for those of us too lazy to find the proper code for ≠ in the heat of the fray)

Other helpful advice came along, most of which centered on demonstrating that you should have a sense of what a field consists of and what sort of questions you'd like to ask as a scholar:

I thought this was a great way of thinking about the question of how much experience you should demonstrate as having already had:

I got fewer responses about whether to discuss a specific member of a department: