How to Maintain Your Tone While Writing Law School Essays

That last sentence requires some elaboration. The law professors and administrators who read your essay will be looking for clues about your communications skills and your aptitude for law school. They'll pick out specific details. But they'll also try to make an overall assessment of your personality. If your essay is carefully organized and unified, it will be natural for the readers to assume that you are a neat and careful person. That's the kind of impression you want to create. But if your essay is brash and blaring-if, for example, you write a long essay about an incident where you were able to squelch someone else with scathing wit-the readers may come to the conclusion that you're not a very attractive person. You don't want to create that impression.

Tone can best be assessed by a reader who doesn't know you at all or whose contact with you has been formal and detached. Always ask your readers how the essay makes you seem: would they hire such a person? Would they go out on a date with such a person? Does the essay make you seem too flippant? Is anything in it in poor taste?


If you tell a joke, make sure it is funny. Jokes depend on timing and delivery and often do not translate well from spoken to written English. They may also be generation-specific. Older and younger people find different things funny. Ask your detached readers whether they laughed while they were reading, and, if so, where. If younger readers laughed and older ones did not, eliminate the joke; grizzled old law professors may view it as evidence of immaturity.

If you're writing about why you want to become a lawyer, you are probably wondering whether you'll be viewed unfavorably if you admit you're in it for the money. This is a question of some delicacy. Even the most cynical lawyers seem to retain a degree of idealism about their profession and don't like to think about its mercenary aspects. They prefer to focus on the intellectual challenge law presents and on the important role that lawyers play in society. They frown on applicants who seem to be interested only in money.

But at the same time, they know that not all candidates will spend their careers working among the poor for little pay. They also know that research has indicated that a desire to make money is often part of a complex of personality characteristics that includes an interest in helping others and the ability to work without close supervision. Put bluntly, they know that an interest in making money isn't incompatible with the qualities needed to be a capable and ethical lawyer.

Your best bet is to express an intellectual interest in some legal topic and to explain how your career will be built around this interest. Try to convey the impression that you are mainly interested in the work, not the compensation. If you expect to work in a large firm or in some lucrative legal area, admit it. You're merely expressing a desire to do well as a by-product of doing good. That's the American dream.

You may also wonder whether admissions officials will read your essay with an eye to deducing your political views and, if so, whether there's an orthodoxy of correct views to which you should subscribe. The answer is no, in the sense that the readers won't care if you are a Democrat or a Republican, or whether you did volunteer work for a soup kitchen for the poor or for a think tank whose goal is the lifting of environmental protection rules. They're lawyers. They recognize legitimate political differences.

Rut lawyers tend to be suspicious of views that seem far out of the mainstream. I'd hesitate to use my essay to describe the thrilling lessons I'd learned while studying marksmanship at a paramilitary summer camp run by neo-Nazis. Nor would I make ideological criticisms of law as a profession or of the admissions process itself.

Many law schools are pioneers in the ongoing effort to acknowledge and respect the differences between subgroups in our multicultural society. Being politically correct in this sense won't hurt you, and it may help. Use common sense. Don't write in such a way that you imply the inferiority of others. If you're a man, don't refer to young women as babes or gals and don't reminiscent about the good old days when women stayed home with the children. If you're a woman, don't write as though men are members of an alien oppressor class.

It's worth making an effort to avoid hurting the feelings of others. If you don't, you may be accused of inadvertent insensitivity, as U.S. Representative Robert Michel was. While reminiscing about his youth, Michel once rhapsodized about the fun he'd had singing and dancing in minstrel shows, wearing blackface makeup. He expressed disappointment that that form of entertainment had vanished. He was genuinely surprised when he was accused of racist bigotry.

Inadvertent lapses of this kind can create an incorrect impression of you. They are easily caught by disinterested readers. Some computer editing programs will flag instances of politically insensitive rhetoric.

Writing a clear and persuasive essay takes time. Even after you've chosen your topic, you'll need to organize and write several drafts, have the essay read and critiqued by others, and polish the grammar and rhetoric. In my experience, the chief reason that application essays are unpersuasive is that insufficient time is taken with them. Successful applicants sometimes put their essays through ten or more drafts.

Some prelaw advisers or English teachers are willing to read and critique essays. College placement offices often offer a reading service, but if you use such a service, make sure the readers know it is a law school application essay and not an MBA or job application essay. You may be able to find a high school English teacher, a graduate student, a law student that you've met through the prelaw club's mentoring program, or even a professional editor whom you pay for an assessment.

Your essay will go through many drafts and many waves of readings. Always ask your readers to paraphrase the main point of the essay. Also ask if anything seemed confusing or unclear. Work on developing an earnest and sincere tone and rewrite or eliminate anything that seems inappropriate, in bad taste, or potentially offensive.