The Application Essay
Legal LawWhether you are submitting a personal statement, purpose statement, or diversity essay, be sure to follow these rules:
Rule #1: Edit and proofread, then proofread again Your grammar, spelling, and punctuation must be impeccable. When in doubt, pull out those old standbys The Chicago Manual of Style and Strunk & White. If grammar, spelling, and punctuation aren’t your strong points, ask a friend to help you out (and they’ll walk you through a tutorial, while you’re at it). There’s no excuse for a college grad to screw this up. And beware of the spell checker trap: it won’t catch “correct” when you should have typed “write” and it won’t catch your “public service commitment”. (You laugh, but I saw that typo as a law review editor.) Always have a second set of eyes to review your essays before you submit them.
Rule #2: Nothing cheesy Anything cheesy or fancy will make admissions officers complain. Stay away from the following:
Essays in the form of poetry.
Essays in the form of a legal report (“For all the reasons cited above, the admissions committee must admit the petitioner to Slamdunk Law School”).
Essays in obituary form (“Tracy Johnson died the most respected jurist of her time”).
Essays in the form of an interview.
Pencils, construction paper, perfume, or illustrated essays, no matter how sophisticated.
Rule #3: No Legalisms You’re not yet a lawyer, so your use of legal concepts or terminology will likely show that you have no idea what you’re talking about, not to mention the fact that legal writing is considered divine. terrible for the rest of the world, including admissions officers. Many applicants, for example, refer to a business or individual violating someone’s right to free speech, when, in fact, the First Amendment applies only to government restrictions on speech. And by all means, stay away from anything in Latin.
Rule #4: Show, Don’t Tell Support any general statement with examples and anecdotes. If you write, “Student presidency taught me that leadership means more than delegation,” tell us how you learned that lesson. What were the conflicts and problems you faced? If you write, “I have excellent time management skills,” support that statement by noting that you graduated in the top 10 percent of an engineering program that drops out of 40 percent of engineering freshmen.
Rule #5: Stick to page limits and other minutiae If a school gives you a page or word limit, stick to it. And follow the spirit of the rule as much as the letter: Don’t be too crafty with fonts, margins, and line spacing. The admissions officers won’t give you any break if your essay is under the page limit, but it makes them cross-eyed because the font or line spacing is so small. If a school does not specify a length, a good rule of thumb is two to three pages, double-spaced, eleven-point Times New Roman, with one-inch margins all around. When in doubt, shorter is better than longer. As an admissions officer friend of mine likes to say, “The vast, vast, vast majority of applicants just out of college (almost all applicants, actually) aren’t interesting enough to fill six pages. Show me that you understand my time is valuable and show me that you know how to choose what is really important.”
Be sure to put your name and Social Security number in a header and page numbers in a footer, in case your file breaks and you have to put it back together. Also, identify in the header which essay question you are answering, if you have more than one choice or are submitting more than one essay (“Personal Statement”, “Optional Essay #3”, etc.). By the way, you don’t need to give your essay a title like “Morris 405” or “Jorge.” I have added these titles to the essays in the appendix for easy reference in this chapter.
Do not submit pages that are wrinkled, stained, or smell of marijuana smoke; most admissions officers don’t really look for that contact. Really, your essay should not smell of any kind of smoke.
And finally, if you’re getting too close to your material and think you’re losing perspective, check out the sample essays in the appendix to keep your overall goal in mind. Can you see how much more engaging and revealing the good guys are?
Copyright © 2006 Anna Ivey
Extract
An excerpt from the book The Ivey Guide to Law School Admissions
by Anna Ivey
Posted by Harcourt; April 2005; $14.00 US; 0-15-602979-0
Copyright © 2006 Anna Ivey