Law School Personal Statements: Keys to Success?

By Draza Kolpack

Applying into a post-graduate program is certainly a stressful time for any student, whether they are coming directly out of their undergraduate degree or returning for additional schooling after some time gather experience in the workforce- and of course applying to law school is no different. Among the grades and various test scores that these programs dissect when considering an application, there is another crucial determining factor: a personal statement, 2-4 pages that sums up an applicant’s moral character, credibility, reason for wanting to practice law, and how they are the perfect fit for the program they are applying for. But how is the perfect personal statement crafted? Which styles of writing best suit this niche piece? While it is clear that not every program is the same or provides the same prompts, and that every individual has their own experiences that lend themselves to infinite variability, I have chosen a successful personal statement to analyze myself; in this article I plan to illustrate the stylistic choices, strategies, and personal nuances that made this applicant successful in applying to this incredibly competitive field.

To understand the stylistic strategies that I will be discussing in this piece, it is crucial to understand the styles in which they are rooted. The official style, often found in academic and bureaucratic writing, is characterized by the use of passive or impersonal voice, complex sentences, slow sentence openings, shapeless or ‘unspeakable’ form, excessive use of jargon, a bureaucratic tone, and higher levels of abstraction alongside a number of other nuances. This lays in juxtaposition to the plain style, a style of writing that utilizes an active voice, simpler sentences, an informal tone/diction, and clear subjects with the intention of producing writing that is clear and concise to a large majority of readers in the target audience. The creative style allows authors to supplement a number of facets within their writing regardless of the style employed: strategies supporting emphasis, transitions, clarity, figurative language, syntax, restatement, sound, drama, and word play can all be utilized to make a good piece of writing great; whether one is looking to deliver a more personal tone through their writing, to drive a point home for the purpose of persuasion or understanding, or to simply elevate writing without making it too flowery, the creative style demonstrates that it can certainly be applicable in a number of settings. While not always necessary or desirable, I find that blending these styles (to a degree) is a great way to illustrate your skill as an author; in the case of a personal statement for law school, utilizing the strong diction and jargon that will be necessary in your future field while writing plainly to demonstrate your skill/knowledge in wielding these concepts can be an exceptionally useful skill.

Passage One:

“While I learned to advocate for myself throughout high school, I also learned to advocate for others. My neighbors, knowing my desire to be a lawyer, would often ask me to advocate on their behalf with small grievances. I would make phone calls, stand in line with them at government offices, and deal with difficult landlords. A woman, Elsa, asked me to review her rental agreement to help her understand why her landlord had rented it to someone else, rather than renewing her lease. I scoured the rental agreement, highlighted questionable sections, read the Residential Tenancies Act, and developed a strategy for approaching the landlord”

             What do we see here? The use of active voice, the shorter, less complex sentences, and the ultimately less abstract form of this passage ultimately lends itself to the plain style; the language utilized is easily read and understood, characteristics that serve narrative writing well. The addition of relatively strong diction and a few instances of jargon are skillfully used to promote the author’s credibility as an applicant to the legal program of their choice. It is also important to note that in this passage the author uses exemplum, a creative strategy which means to simply provide a specific, often concrete, example, to highlight pivotal moments in their mindset and/or career that exemplify their individual experience, personify the author, and present them as an ideal candidate.

Passage Two:

I broke from the belief systems I was born into. I did this through education, mentorship, and self-advocacy. There is sadness because in this transition I left people behind, especially as I entered university. However, I am devoted to my home community. I understand the barriers that stand between youth and their success. As a law student, I will mentor as I was mentored, and as a lawyer, I will be a voice for change.

            This passage has many parallels in regards to stylistic choice as passage one. The key element I would like to focus on is this author’s use of the creative style strategy, climax; this conclusion to the personal statement also works as a climax or a culmination of all the growth they wrote about in this piece, driving home the message of how their experience shaped them and why they should be accepted by using short, abrupt sentences with powerful content.

Readability Statistics: (From the article as a whole)

 

(Gunning Fog Index: estimated grade level required to understand text / Flesch Reading Ease: scale from 1-100, 1 being most difficult to read and 100 being the easiest)

            Though I have been touching on this concept for the majority of this article, we must discuss this piece of writing in its primary context- a personal statement as part of an application to a law school. Without knowing the school for which this applicant was applying, it is difficult to know what the exact prompt they were provided with was. The safe assumption, however, is that this personal statement was written with the intention of illustrating the applicant’s credibility and experience as well as demonstrating why they would be a good fit for the program specifically (much like a job interview in which one applies themselves to the company’s statement or message). In the end, I feel that the utilization of primarily plain and creative styles served to best illustrate the applicant’s moral character and ideology, something that is undoubtably taken into account because grades and other achievements/opportunities participated in are taken into account separately from the personal statement. But I feel like it would be negligent to call the official style less than useful in this context; while it is true that the plain and creative styles fit the narrative form of this piece, the official style is used subtly as a means of demonstrating the author’s ability to craft words and use diction appropriate for the field. I find that this piece is a good opportunity for writers to practice their ability to blend these styles in a way that exemplifies your skill as a writer without falling into the potential floweriness of the official and creative styles, or the sometimes-lacking nature of the plain style. But does this answer the question of “what stylistic choices are more suitable for a personal statement?” No, not necessarily, but I think it is important to recognize that individuality is often just as important as finding that perfect style; even disregarding that each program may have a different prompt which may lead to different stylistic choices taking priority, your own story can be bent and presented in infinite ways by utilizing a plethora of writing genres and styles.

Technology Translator

By Tiffany Yang

As an Information Systems major, learning about prose writing styles has intrigued me to analyze how technology is written and communicated to the general public. Technology is a niche field of knowledge, mainly obtained only by educated and trained professionals. Having grown up without advanced technology and before having pursued this field, I always found technology instructions were rather difficult to understand and follow. Therefore, I found an article that provides an explanation of how to connect a router to a modem, in plain style. This is the article I have chosen to analyze, to determine how well the writers have converted something that is commonly complex, to an easy and non-obscuring plain style.

Before we begin, we must understand the context of this article, called “How to Connect a Router to a Modem – Create a Wi-Fi network and connect to the web.” It was published on a website called Lifewire. In their description, they state that their mission is to:

...help people get the most out of the technology that dominates all of our lives today. We provide context for the latest technology news, an extensive library of updated educational how-to articles, and independent product advice and reviews to more than 15 million users each month. Our goal is to help consumers understand what is happening in the world of tech, figure out what products enhance their lives, and learn how to make it all work. We aim to be the trustworthy, friendly, and authoritative voice for people who use their tech every single day and expect it to work. When it doesn't, they want to search for an answer, get it working, and get on with their day.

Based on this description, we can confirm that their target audience is open to the general public. They aim to help people who have access to internet and need help finding quick, easy and understandable answers to solve their technology problems. This article was also one of the first five links that appeared after googling, “How to install a router,” meaning it’s extremely accessible and there are little to no restrictions to inclusivity. This article was also written by Robert Earl Wells, a writer from Portland, Oregon. He graduated from the University of North Carolina, and his areas of expertise include smart home, gaming, steaming entertainment, Android and iOS, software and apps, consumer technology and social media. He has over 15 years of experience writing, editing, and being a technology enthusiast. Lifewire has fact checkers to ensure solutions, facts and technical information in their news articles are accurate and comprehensive and statistics are properly sourced and up to date.

Now that we have covered the background and contextual factors, let us now discuss the contents of the article. To simplify my analysis, I have selected a portion of the article to examine:

To log into your router and change the network settings, open a web browser, enter your router's IP address in the URL bar, then enter the user name and password. Once logged into your router's admin interface, you can set up a guest network, configure security settings, and more. At a minimum, you should change the default Wi-Fi password to decrease the likelihood of hackers infiltrating your network. If you or another person changed the default user name and password, reset your router to factory settings. Insert the straightened end of a paperclip into the hole on the router's back and hold down the reset button inside for 10 seconds.

The first step in my analysis was to put this into a readability calculator, which provides the statistics involving Gunning Fog index (the indication of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to easily understand the text on the first reading), and the Flesch Reading Ease (the number representing readability). For this portion of the article, it scored a Gunning Fog index of 12.12, meaning that someone would require about 12 years of education to understand these instructions, which is relatively high. One of the determining factors of plain style is a low Gunning Fog index. It also scored a Flesch Reading Ease of 47.11, which is relatively low, when plain style should have high numbers of reading eases. These high scores argue the instructions provided by Lifewire are not as simple and easily comprehensive as they would hope, and it has readability statistics an official style piece would have.

Next let’s look at the strategies identified. The obvious strategy that is usually the main cause for obscurity in technology is the use of special terminology, also known as jargon. Technology has specific terms which offer no plausible substitutes. For example, in the text, the terms network, IP address, admin interface, and URL are possible causes of obscurity. The article uses these terms assuming readers have basic knowledge and understanding of technology. Another official style strategy used was the incorporation of multiple ideas in a singular sentence. Let’s look at this sentence for example, “Once logged into your router's admin interface, you can set up a guest network, configure security settings, and more.” This sentence mentions multiple areas of technology that could have been split up and described in more detail to provide a better understanding to readers. What are they? Why do they need to be set up? What else more? This sentence will cause uncertainty, leaving readers with unresolved issues. The use of jargon confirms that this uses official style strategies.

Although it has official style indicators, this article also has many plain style strategies. The first one being the low level of formality. This article is written in second person, creating a less formal tone for the article. The second strategy is the use of active voice, which is when the sentence or statement present the subject and following is the action of doing or verb, as opposed to passive voice which is the opposite in which the verb is presented first, followed by the subject. For example, the sentence “At a minimum, you should change the default Wi-Fi password to decrease the likelihood of hackers infiltrating your network” is active, but if it were to be written in official style passive voice, it would be revised as: “To decrease the likelihood of hackers infiltrating your network, you change the default Wi-Fi password.”

In conclusion, after taking into consideration the context of this article, the purpose, the audience, and the strategies, I believe this article did its best to translate complex technical instructions into something much simpler and more comprehensible, but because the terminology used don’t have simpler alternative choices, it is hard to replace the terminology with something more straightforward and transparent. The terminology in this particular article is needed, therefore cannot be avoided or replaced. What this article could have done better is split up multiple ideas, provide details and basic background knowledge of each idea or topic, instead of assuming all readers have an understanding. Despite this main flaw, the article does embody traits of plain style and to someone who does have basic knowledge of technology, these instructions would be easy to follow.

Style in Cormac McCarthy's The Road

By M. Thomas

Stylistically speaking, sometimes writing for the sake of complexity stretches far away from a target audience. When sending a text, a bygone word such as “indubitably” is almost never used unless the author is aiming to either impress or humor someone. Texts often come in short bursts - unless looking only at an older generation of texters - with little to no grammatical thought put into them. Contrary to any official or academic style of writing, the plain style of writing is favored for the majority of modern writing done outside of a professional setting: otherwise known as a social setting. That being said, social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all have millions of examples of this style of writing. However, none of those examples are necessarily surprising or unique. Sure, plain style allows people to communicate with one another in a social setting, but something far more fascinating to me is Cormac McCarthy's employment of it in his novel The Road.

            There is absolutely no need to move anywhere past the first page in The Road when looking for examples of plain style:

“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang” (McCarthy, 1). 

            One of the immediate things to notice in McCarthy’s writing is the lack of punctuation, something that would annoy someone’s mother or perhaps a friend who is also not-so-secretly a member of the grammar police. There are moments where a conjunction is uncomfortably used without a comma, and sentences end and begin much more suddenly than in most other fiction pieces. There are more complex words that McCarthy uses such as “glaucoma” and “flowstone” in his writing, but his language and imagery that he allows any reader to process within his stylistically-short sentences is what makes his writing unique and mold-breaking as compared to many other strictly creative-style authors of countless other novels of similar subjects, themes, and topics.

Approaching writing a novel with the intention of communicating concisely with the reader is McCarthy’s formula for success, and it endlessly depends on plain-style and no-nonsense techniques. In a quote accredited to an article in Open Culture, McCarthy stated, “There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate” (Jones). While it is arguable that McCarthy may not be writing in an entirely correct way, and he has made plenty of people squirm with his plain style of writing, he has written many different novels and stories in this style, and all of them are focused on one thing in particular: clarity.

            Plain styles of writing are often incredibly concise and clear in what they mean to communicate while avoiding heavy jargon and complex concepts that readers may not fully understand. McCarthy’s writing aims to avoid those complex concepts used in academic and scholarly writing and instead writes in the aforementioned plain style While there are plenty of creative and therefore ambiguous aspects to McCarthy’s writing, he spends lots of time excluding things such as quotation marks (one of his most infamous stylistic choices) in order to take all the jumble that he possibly can off of the page. In stead of the removed quotation marks, McCarthy relies specifically on spacing and indentation to communicate any conversation between characters in his stories:

“The boy turned in the blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he said.

I’m right here.

I know” (McCarthy, 2).

While in the top section of that writing, a reader may not notice that someone has begun talking due to the lack of quotation marks, McCarthy’s heavy reliance on indentation always pays off as verbal communication between characters surprisingly does not only rely on the presence of quotation marks, but instead relies on two things: quotation marks and indentation, and only one of which must be present. In his writing, McCarthy has faith that people will comprehend textual clues given to them and interpret dialogue as conversation between characters. Many authors choose to write in ways that assume an audience to have some members which require as many cues as possible to follow a story, but McCarthy’s writing methods have proven that a general audience can discern conversation via only one or two contextual clues/patterns. In an interview with Oprah, McCarthy stated, “You really have to be aware that there are no quotation marks and write in such a way as to guide people as to who’s speaking” (Oprah). In McCarthy’s writing, it is easy to see that he is able to guide people with such a simple technique while using arguably simple and plain language as well. McCarthy uses a plain style of writing in an unexpectedly creative way, breaking boundaries between two often separate categories of writing.

The clarity of McCarthy’s writing is something rather rare among writers, but it is a creative decision that has worked in his favor both in the number of volumes he has sold, and his overall popularity as a writer. While I had never heard of Cormac McCarthy before reading The Road in a high school English classroom, his style of writing is revolutionary when it comes to the combination of plain and creative styles. Hopefully, more writers will take influence from McCarthy and learn to work outside of those unwritten rules which constrain writers to tapping the quotation mark key every time there is dialogue, and using a comma with conjunctions.

Works Cited

Jones, John. "Cormac Mccarthy’S Three Punctuation Rules, And How They All Go Back To James Joyce". Open Culture, 2022, https://www.openculture.com/2013/08/cormac-mccarthys-punctuation-rules.html?adlt=strict&toWww=1&redig=F53FE94C9E5045DA938038F74E8F6979.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Pan Macmillan, 2006.

McCarthy, Cormac. "Cormac Mccarthy On The Power Of The Subconscious". Interview by Oprah Winfrey. 2022.