How Law Students Can Write Persuasive Essays

Admissions officers will judge you on the basis of what your essays reveal about your writing ability (including your ability to persuade, structure, and maintain a well-reasoned argument, and communicate in an interesting and professional manner), honesty and maturity, understanding of what the program offers and requires and how well you would contribute to it, and clear ideas about where you are headed. They will want to learn what you have accomplished, who you are as a person, and how well you can communicate. Admissions officers never take the approach of teachers who said, "I'll grade this on the basis of the content, not your writing style."

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Saving Time: Applications on Disk

One of the pains of applying to schools is filling in the finicky little boxes on the application forms. (Who still has an old typewriter around for completing them?) Fortunately, a good alternative now exists. A firm called Multi-App has produced software that allows you to replicate admissions forms on your computer. The information that is common to all applications—such as your name and address, undergraduate university, etc.—needs to be inserted only once. The software then places this in the correct blanks on each application form. Sixty-three law schools subscribe to Multi-App; all of the leading programs do.

For information, contact:

Law Multi-App
V40 South Chester Road, Suite F
Swarthmore, PA 19081
(800) 515-2927
mcs@multi-app.com
www.multi-app.com

The price for Multi-App's complete set of materials is $59; it can be easily downloaded from the Internet.

Admissions directors seem quite happy to get the information in this format, so do not be concerned that your application will be at a disadvantage if you use this procedure.

Before Writing

Before starting to write, let's review what we know about your audience and its decision criteria.
Who is your audience? Your audience is the set of admissions officers who will read your application. They are conscientious but nearly overwhelmed by the volume of material they are required to read. They are highly familiar with the determinants of law school and career success. Thus, they will examine your application for convincing evidence of your intellectual ability, potential in the field of law, and individual personal characteristics. Being in the education business, they want applicants who clearly value learning and education. They will also like evidence that a person makes the most of opportunities, whether these be great or small.

By communicating effectively—presenting your material in an organized and concise fashion, and not exaggerating or lying—you will gain credibility as a reliable source of information about yourself and as an appropriate candidate. Remember that as important as it is to be sure you are addressing the committee's concerns; your essays should reveal yourself and convey a true sense of who you are as a person. This may, in fact, be your only chance to do so.

What are the top law schools looking for'? The three principle criteria—your intellectual ability, professional promise, and personal characteristics—are commonly sought by all of the top schools. What does a particular school look for? All schools look for certain traits, such as analytical ability. Yet not every school is looking for exactly the same sort of candidate. Some will concentrate slightly on finding applicants focused on public service, for example, whereas others want those who are technologically oriented. If you are aware of what a given school is looking for, you can emphasize those aspects of your candidacy that are most suited to its needs.

To ensure that you put together a well-integrated, consistent package, do not try to finish any one essay until you have done at least a rough draft of all the essays for a given school, and planned the other parts of your package as well.

Planning

It is important to plan your writing. Planning forces you to think about what you will write before you get tied up in the actual process. Too many people take the opposite approach, writing random paragraphs, hoping to be able to glue them together later, or trying to write the whole of an essay before thinking about it. The results of these approaches are all too predictable. The material included is a haphazard selection of what might be presented and the writing is not necessarily organized and coherent. No amount of editing will cure this problem, which is not merely a problem of word choice or transitions. The greatest problem with the write-before-thinking approach is that, after expending great efforts, writers are disappointed with the results and must go back to what should have been the starting point—thinking about what they should say.

Developing Your Material

All too many essays sound the same. The poor admissions officer who has to read 5,000 essays, or many more, gains no understanding of an applicant who writes a personal statement that could have been written by any of another 500 applicants to the same school. Few applicants take the time to ask what makes them unusual or unique (or valuable). Your goal is to develop materials that will help you write stories unique to you, which no one but you could tell.

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Pulling together the relevant material for your application essay (or essays, depending on what your particular case may be) will take substantial effort, especially if you have been working for a number of years at different jobs. The material that might be relevant to the essays could come from virtually any time in your life, and be from any episode or experience.

Organizing Your Material

After you have generated your information, you must organize it. There are many methods for doing so. One is to determine the core of your messages. In other words, what key points are you trying to make? If you can state these, the next step is to group your supporting material according to the appropriate points, To organize your thinking effectively, it is generally a good idea to outline your essay. This will save you time because the outline will make it clear whether you have too much or too little material. It will also allow you to make changes early in the process rather than work on something that will be eliminated because it does not belong. In other words, it is a check on your thinking.

In particular, note the following tenets of good writing:

• Simplicity. Every sentence should be stripped down to its basic components. Every word that is redundant or does not add meaning should be removed. Writing improves when you pare it down and eliminate unnecessary words or phrases. For example, "a very good friend of my mother's" is better as "my mother's friend." "Hideously ugly" is better as simply "ugly" or "hideous."
   
• Precision. Be as detailed and specific as possible at all times. Details bring authenticity to your writing. If your readers see the word "car," their minds are left with a fuzzy, forgettable image. But if they read "rusted-out, peagreen '78 Dodge," they are left with an indelible picture.
   
• Show rather than tell. Rather than tell readers what a situation is like, show them the situation (i.e., describe it in detail) and they will sense on their own what you want them to feel. For example, do not tell readers, "I was very sad when my older brother moved to Bangkok." Instead, describe the twisted feeling you had in your stomach as you sat on his bed while he packed his things; recall the last few minutes of nervous conversation the two of you had before he slipped out the back door; describe the tears you shed as you watched the car pull away for the airport; talk about sitting at the breakfast table all alone with your parents after his departure; explore the feelings of abandonment you sensed when he called home but never asked to speak to you. By showing the situation, you will more powerfully convey to your readers how lonely and sad you really were.
   
• Choose your words carefully. Do not follow the masses; avoid cliches and common phrases whose "understood" meanings could be conveyed more effectively using different words. Cliches will dull your reader and make you sound unimaginative or lazy. Phrases such as "blind as a bat" or "it was like looking for a needle in a haystack" can be better and more precisely conveyed in your own original words.
   
• Stick to one style and tone. Decide before writing what kind of style and tone you will employ, and stay with it throughout the entire essay. If your tone at the beginning of an essay is light-natured and humorous, do not switch to a somber or stern voice midway through the piece. If your essay is meant to be fashioned as a personal diary entry, do not suddenly start preaching to an outside audience.
   
• Alter the lengths, styles, and rhythms of your sentences for variety. Your writing should contain some very long sentences as well as some especially short ones for greatest effect. You should not rely too heavily on any one or two sentence constructions, but weave many different sentence forms and structures into your essays.
   
• Forget what you learned in grade school. Every essay does not have to have the kind of "introduction," "body," and "conclusion" that you learned about as a kid. Your writing does need to be organized and unified, but organization and the development of ideas take on more sophisticated meanings once you have mastered the basics of writing. Your introduction does not have to have one single "topic sentence," nor does it have to summarize everything that will follow in the body of the essay. Your conclusion does not have to restate the topic sentence. Using the first person ("I") is entirely appropriate and necessary for law school essays. Throw out the old rules of thumb if you have not already done so.

The Rough Draft

The next step in the writing process is to produce a rough draft. Be sure you are not too demanding of yourself at this point. Even though you want to do a good job, here "the perfect is the enemy of the good." If you are unwilling to write down anything that is less than final-draft quality, you are highly likely to be unable to write anything at all. Rather than take this perfectionist approach, be sure to limit your goal to that of producing a rough draft that incorporates most of the basic points you want to make. Do not be concerned if the order you had planned to follow no longer seems to work well, or if you cannot quite express your thoughts, or if your word choice is awkward. Get something reasonable down on paper as a starting point.

Editing Your Rough Draft

Remember that "the only good writing is rewriting." You are doing your first part of this rewriting when you start to edit your rough draft. One of the most important aspects of the editing stage is its timing. Editing without a break between the drafting and the editing stages will limit your insight into the flaws of your draft. You will not see where you skipped a needed transition or explanation because you are too close to the original writing. If you can take a break, preferably at least a night, or better yet, a week, you will be better able to read your draft from the perspective of an outsider.

Proofreading

Why proofread your paper if you have been careful in composing the final draft? No matter how careful you have been, errors are still likely to crop up. Taking a last look at the essay is a sensible precaution. What are you looking for? Basically, the task at this point is no longer to make sure the structure is correct; it is to spot any errors or omissions in your sentences and individual words. Errors tend to show up most often where prior changes were made. Combining two paragraphs into one, for example, may have resulted in the loss of a necessary transition phrase. Grammatical mistakes can also live on.

As with any task that is essentially a matter of editing, your timing is of the essence. Wait until you have already finished what you consider to be your final draft. If you can then put down this draft for a few days, you will be able to give it an effective last look. If not, you risk being unable to see mistakes because you are still too close to the writing. Another useful precaution is to have a friend proofread your essays.

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