Making Your Law School Essay Sound Correct

Law professors may pore over your essay for evidence that you can communicate clearly in writing. You can best demonstrate the possession of a skill that eventually can be put to use in your profession writing legal memos and briefs by making sure that your essay uses the written English language properly according to the rules. You need to demonstrate that you can write mainstream English (adult) prose.

Many lawyers and law professors are dissatisfied with the quality of the prose that their colleagues turn out. Lawyers are said to write excessively wordy and lengthy sentences; to write unnecessarily in the passive voice; and to rely excessively on technical terms, vague words, and repetitive qualifying clauses. As a response to this criticism, writing requirements have been stiffened at many law schools.


You can make yourself attractive by showing that your own prose does not suffer from the defects common in the profession. C. Edward Good's book, Mightier Than the Sword: Powerful Writing in the Legal Profession (Charlottesville, Va.: Blue Jeans Press, 1989), analyzes many of the rhetorical traps that legal prose commonly falls into, and gives suggestions for rewriting to avoid them. It's a good idea to avoid footnotes. Readers quickly tire when they have to keep jumping back and forth from text to notes.

Grammar and punctuation count. Word usage, proper paragraphing, and such sophisticated rhetorical techniques as parallelism all count. If you have difficulty with such things, refer to any standard guide to English usage. The Little, Brown Handbook and similar manuals are commonly available on campus. Perhaps you've kept the copy you needed for freshman English composition.

Stick to Standard English. If you're a nontraditional and you de scribe your work experience, make sure you define any unusual words and explain any technical processes. Unless you need it for some specific reason, it's best to avoid slang, especially teenage slang. The essay will be read by people substantially older than yourself. It will not help you if they find it unintelligible. Avoid legal jargon unless you need it for some specific purpose and can handle it properly. Your readers will spot any errors. Besides, legal rhetoric tends to make young people sound pompous and pedantic. Think of the law students you've met who speak in long, windy sentences full of big words and Latinisms.

Once you've polished what you hope will be final draft, you should seek out an English teacher for a final reading for grammatical and rhetorical correctness. Professional editing services are available in most large cities and college towns. It's considered dishonest to let a professional or anyone else write the essay for you. Law schools have a control mechanism for this kind of cheating: Law Services sends each of the law schools you apply to a photocopy of the essay you wrote as part of the LSAT. If a question arises about whether or not you actually wrote your application essay, your LSAT essay can be used for comparison. Though an extemporaneous essay written under time constraints will be different from a polished essay written at leisure, educators are experienced at allowing for such differences. "It's like Frank Sinatra singing on a record and singing in your living room," one English teacher told me. "The tone isn't as good in your living room and he may hit a flat note once in a while. But it's still Frank Sinatra."

So you can't let somebody else write your essay. It has to sound like you. The rule is that the essay must be "substantially your own work." But it's perfectly ethical to hire an editor to check the grammar and spelling. A good editor will suggest ways to improve the essay-for example, by reworking the organization to put the strongest parts in more visible places-but will always leave the final choices up to you.

Format

Law schools have received essays scribed on birch bark and home-made parchment, drawn on watercolor with calligraphy pens, crayoned on Manila paper, and even scrawled on cocktail napkins with bleeding fountain pens. Increasingly, they have received essays on videotape, either read aloud by the candidate or dramatized in some fashion. In response, most now instruct you to submit your work only on white 8V2" x 11" typing paper.

Even if you have a choice, don't use a bizarre format just to demonstrate "creativity" apart from the content of your essay. True, law schools keep insisting that they want creative students. But a lawyer's idea of creativity involves innovation within established forms. It's not the creativity of the sculptor who is free to choose steel, granite, or cream cheese, depending on his or her inspiration. It's the creativity of the cake decorator, who must decide how to make the cake look appetizing but whose choice of materials is limited by the overriding fact that the cake must remain safe to eat. A lawyer must express an idea clearly and persuasively. But he must do so in a brief written in very standardized language, typed on the kind of paper specified by the judge and filed with a clerk by a certain deadline. Consider yourself bound by established forms. Use 8V2" x 11" paper unless some alternate medium contributes something to the message that can be added in no other way.

A few law schools want you to submit your essay in your own hand-writing. This will enable officials to compare it with your LSAT essay and whatever other specimens of your handwriting are in your file to determine whether the essay is actually your own work. (Theoretically, it also permits detailed analysis by handwriting experts, but I don't know of any law schools actually doing graphology at the moment.) If no such requirement exists, your essay should be carefully typed. You need not buy extra-heavy bond paper or rent a laser printer.

As with anything you do, neatness counts. Typographical errors and even blots and smudges distract the attention of the reader from the content of the essay. The best way to avoid typographical errors is to type the essay yourself on word processing equipment, stopping frequently to proofread. Hired typists, and even friends, are less familiar with your own vocabulary and less well motivated to do a good job.

Before you send it off, make sure your name appears on each page of your essay. Number the pages. Use paper clips, not staples.

When I asked about essays, one law professor told me that "We like to see an applicant who is professional about it." That's a good word to remember. If you aren't sure about some detail of your essay's format, ask yourself whether a lawyer would do it this way. Is it something that would seem appropriate in a professional? All your hard work is most likely to pay off if you can convince the admissions committee that you've got what it takes to be a valued colleague some day.