You already have a personal statement draft. Today you put it to work on a real target: one realistic future opportunity, one tailored version of the statement, the same person underneath.

If you do not have Draft 1 yet, use your strongest evidence notes from the earlier lessons and write a short starter tailored paragraph today.

The trap is rewriting yourself into whoever you think they want. Tailoring changes what the reader meets first. It does not invent a second identity.

Before you cut or reorder anything, commit to what three different readers care about most. Work through the claims below on your honest first instinct: which lines are sound, and which are traps? You will meet the same idea again when you annotate a real tailored sample.

Two words carry today's work. Tailoring is changing what a reader meets first without changing the facts, and a variant is one reshaped version of your statement written for one named opportunity.

Aoife kept one core identity and wrote a short apprenticeship version of her statement from it. On screen you will label each marked phrase, including the phrases she signalled as cut or played down because they did not fit this panel.

When the model labels appear, notice where you disagreed. That comparison is the class activity for this block.

Then open your own draft and start Personal Statement Tailored V1 in your Strand 1.1 folder: one named real or realistic opportunity, a tailored version of about 200-350 words, plus three sentences on what you changed and why that audience needed it. This is ALT 1 evidence: a tailored version of your personal statement. If you do not finish saving the file in class, complete and save it today as same-day portfolio work.

Read Tomas's case in the worked example. He had a solid main draft, then "tailored" it for two different opportunities and damaged both. As each note appears on his two versions, decide what he should keep, what he should move, and what he should stop doing.

Talk through these prompts with the person beside you:

• For the higher education version, what concrete fact should he put back, and what hollow phrase should he delete first?
• For the community traineeship, what should meet the reader in the first five lines, and how should he tell the truth about his coaching experience in one checkable sentence?
• What single tailoring rule would have stopped both failures?
• Look at your Personal Statement Tailored V1. Where are you closest to Tomas's mistakes, and what will you fix before you save?

Then finish the three sentences under your tailored version: what you changed, what you kept, and why that audience needed the new shape. Save the file as Personal Statement Tailored V1 beside your main draft in Strand 1.1.

Optional stretch: write a second short variant for a contrasting audience (if your first was apprenticeship-shaped, try HE or community). Keep it to one tight paragraph plus two lines on what flipped between the two variants.

Save it beside Tailored V1 only if it stays honest to the same core. ALT 1 is stronger when you can show you reshape without reinventing.