Sarah McGinty
Title: Founder, McGinty Consulting Group; Boston
Age: 67
Experience: 25 years at McGinty Consulting
Sarah McGinty – Sally to those who know her – was an English teacher and professor before her godson approached her for help with his college admission essay. That experience got her to thinking, and her thinking was right. There are lots of high school kids who need help putting together a convincing college essay. But she didn’t stop there.
Executives across a wide range of businesses also need help stringing jargon-free sentences together, both on paper and in speech. Here, McGinty talks about the challenges non-writers face when it comes time to commit ideas to paper or to the ears of a waiting audience.
Q: You do a fair amount of speaking and writing coaching for executives. I’m interested in the range of people you see in that line.
A: The interest in application essays grew out of a larger interest in how people advocate for themselves. That has to do with any kind of verbal communication, or anytime you are called upon to explain yourself in any kind of a public setting. Above that is an interest in how we evaluate other people. How do we make decisions about who we want to join our company? Who do we want to be a part of our school? Who do we want on this team that we’re forming to solve this problem? How can people effectively deliver, in a reliable way, enough information that good judgments are made? You’ve probably interviewed people who, when they talked about their leadership skills, it was compelling. But what it was like when they actually took over the desk, maybe yes, maybe no.
Q: The people you see from the corporate world, what are their strengths and what are their weaknesses?
A: I think one of the most universal complaints that people who come to talk to me about is apparently the quite universal idea of having stated an idea in a meeting, eliciting no response whatsoever, and five minutes later having someone else say that and having everyone in the room say, “We love Otto’s idea.” Everyone always says they were the last person chosen for the baseball team in fourth grade, and in that same sense, everyone says “I’m always the person whose idea is overlooked,” and that’s unlikely. The question is timing the presentation of an idea. Maybe you should have said it a second time yourself. If your boss is going to be in that meeting, you might want to grab him that morning and say, “You know, I’m really thinking about this.” So, if you start to talk in the meeting and your boss starts (nodding), it’s going well.
Q: Do you see similarities between student writing and executive writing?
A: I see a shared set of problems. Can I get five cents for every financial analyst’s website that says they’re passionate about growth? The challenge there is people can be made uncomfortable – sometimes in a good way, sometimes not – by the tangential approach to things. If everyone’s always a relationship manager, and you say, “I’m your contact person,” you might hear, “Oh, I was looking for a relationship manager.” We educate ourselves into these kind of things. For high school students, every college application uses the word “significant,” and for them, that transforms into “What do you want me to say?” That’s a really ugly bear trap.
For Readers With College-Bound Children – Five Things To Know About Application Essays:
- It’s about who you are, not what you’ve done.
- This is an essay, and you’ve written a lot of essays. It isn’t that different.
- You’re the world’s authority on the topic.
- Don’t write about something you just thought of 20 minutes ago.
- Proofread.
