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.

Inside Zadie Smith's Writing

“Creative Style” Critique:  Zadie Smith

            Creative style is far different than its companions, official and plain, solely, in my opinion, because of its freedom, its infinite vision, particularly when paired with the fictional novel.  There really are no significant or harsh boundaries required of the creative style, similarly with fiction literature, and it is free to incorporate all styles into one; an exquisite example of this use would be in the writing of White Teeth by Zadie Smith.  Her story mainly follows two families, the Joneses and the Iqbals, as they navigate the contemporary world of living as a human being.  There are a handful of perspectives that are presented throughout the novel, but they all connect in the very end, both literally and figuratively.  This freedom allows Smith to share her message or story in a way that she finds most effective.  She intelligently chooses which styles to use, where, and how.  This is what leads Smith to spread her message; she can speak to anyone who picks up the novel and reads, simply through her book.  Smith takes on the challenge of using creative style, so she can teach and delight, the foundation of literature studies.

            For our view, we will begin with readability statistics to get a formal, albeit superficial, basis for Smith’s writing.  There were two specific excerpts from separate sections of the book that were analyzed, and they can give us a workable range of readability to get a sense of the novel overall and where Smith’s writing can stretch.  The Simple Measure of Gobbledygook, also known as SMOG, offers approximate required years of education in order to comprehend the reading; White Teeth’s excerpts scored 11.02 to 16.78.  As for the Flesch Reading Ease, it scores between 0 and 100—the higher values indicate an easier read while the lower values imply higher difficulty.  Smith’s Ease score fell between 35.13 and 60.12.  These arbitrary numbers actually give us some insight into how readers will take to the novel.  For instance, the SMOG results show that Smith’s work could be taken well with High School to College-educated individuals, and the Ease score shows a standard to difficult comprehension. 

            A deeper dive into Smith’s language shows her use of all three styles in various ways.  For example, she has a fantastic way of distinguishing characters and their development.  Some characters, like the Chalfen family, are known as intellectuals and can be picked out easily by their dialogue.  They use a lot of official style strategies like longer, more complex sentences with a large, sophisticated vocabulary, like specific botanical terms or science strategies.  In addition, when Smith starts detailing a memory, or flashback, or even a background description, she tends to write in a more official to plain style, sort of like a news or blog article.  However, when Smith starts exploring more creatively, readers start to become more engaged.  The creativeness is what is real to readers and what truly speaks to them.  There is a plethora of figurative and creative language such as diazeugma, expletives to catch attention and for emphasis, epithets, appositives, similes, and so on.  This kind of language is what sets creativity apart.  Official and plain styles follow guidelines and seem to retain less emotion or humanity; they are monotone.  Creativity lets humans express themselves in a way they see fit.  It is colorful, it is raw, it is honest.

            There is a true beauty to creative style; it can attract so many people, readers, and writers alike, and offers just as many insights and evaluations.  Official and plain styles may get to the point faster, if you will, and are professional or universal to a point where it may be masking a writer’s unique voice and visions.  With creative styles, there is the potential to be limitless in understanding and influence.  It becomes a more intimate experience between audience, text, and author, and it never stops growing—the creativity, the discourse, the ability to reach more and more people each in their own way.

The Creative Reach of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

The first thing that comes to mind when I hear “creative style” is a well-written novel where I can get lost in a world different than my own. The Harry Potter series, a favorite of mine, is the best-selling book series in the world, and for good reason. This series transcends age and is truly a magical journey for any reader. This is a unique part of J.K. Rowling’s writing of the Harry Potter series. 12-year olds love it, 30-year olds love it. It is hard to capture such a wide-ranging audience with the same story, having to be sophisticated enough for the adults but simply imaginative enough for the younger readers, but Rowling’s version of creative style in Harry Potter does just that.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is the third installment in the Harry Potter series and often regaled as one of the best books of the series. Rowling churned out the third book in about a year, directly following the release of the second novel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Despite being one of the shorter books, Azkaban delivers a story of depth and growth, as the writing evolves as Harry gets older.

The first few pages of a book often establish the pace and style in which the rest of the writing will follow. In the beginning of Azkaban, Rowling manages to convey the longing and sorrow a child has for their friend over the summer break from school, while also bringing in sophisticated emotion in Harry’s struggle with his non-nurturing family and the gut wrenching feeling you have when your life is so tragic, even you forget your own birthday.

The biggest anomaly to me is Rowling’s ability to capture attention across multiple generations. Perhaps it is a mixture of relatability to Harry as he endures common adolescent troubles that everyone can either look back on or look forward to combined with the mature experience of agony Harry feels after facing death and abuse.

Rowling’s first unique use of creative style is when she includes an excerpt from Harry’s magical textbook. Instead of just telling the reader Harry is reading a textbook, the reader gets to look at the words as well, as if they are in Harry’s Place.

“The quill paused at the top of a likely looking paragraph. Harry pushed his round glasses up the bridge of his nose, moved his flashlight closer to the book, and read:

Non-magic people (more commonly known as Muggles) were particularly afraid of magic in medieval times, but not very good at recognizing it. On the rare occasion that they did catch a real witch or wizard, burning had no effect whatsoever. The witch or wizard would perform a basic Flame-Freezing Charm and then pretend to shriek with pain while enjoying a gentle, tickling sensation. Indeed, Wendelin the Weird enjoyed being burned so much that she allowed herself to be caught no less than forty-seven times in various disguises.”

Within this excerpt and as well as in the other writing Rowling uses distinction often to provide the meaning of some words, especially when they are specific to the magical world. This helps the younger reader in understanding things that may still be confusing to them but may also aid the older generations of readers who are focusing more on the story and less on the wizarding world vernacular.

This small example of Rowling’s writing of the Harry Potter series shows a variety of rhetorical strategies. A small example of scesis onomaton is used in her description of Harry’s attempt at being discreet in doing his homework in the dark when he “slowly and very carefully” opens his ink bottle. By saying he is slowly opening the bottle implies he is also being careful, but the repletion of the idea truly emphasizes the care he must take in order to complete a simple task. The emphasis on Harry’s attention to keeping his magical activities on lock and key comes later in the example when he puts his things away. Instead of providing his actions in one sentence separated by commas implying he is doing things simultaneously or right after the other they are separated by semi colons.

“He replaced the top of the ink bottle; pulled an old pillowcase from under his bed; put the flashlight, A History of Magic, his essay, quill, and ink inside it; got out of bed; and hid the lot under a loose floorboard under his bed.”

This gives the idea that each step he takes to put his things away is a separate move, as if he has to pause carefully after each movement in order to maintain the silence that is expected of him.

The Harry Potter series is loved by decades of people and it is due to J.K. Rowling’s ability to write in a way that appeals to that large of an audience in a successfully creative way. Her words and use of rhetorical devices are precisely the reason so many find her world just as magical as Harry finds his.

Noelle H.

Sentimental Repetition: I Love You Forever

I Love You Forever by Robert Munch is a beloved children’s book published in 1986. The story came to Munch by way of the lullaby that is repeated throughout the story:

I’ll love you forever

            I’ll like you for always

            As long as I’m living

            My baby you’ll be.

Munch used to sing this lullaby to himself after he and his wife had two stillborn babies. According to this interview with Munch, this story emerged quickly as he was performing the lullaby in front of an audience. His publisher refused to publish the story that he wrote because it was too dark for children’s literature, but his distributor decided it was a story worth sharing. This 34-year-old book goes beyond children’s literature and captures the hearts of people of all ages.  But why? It’s interesting why this book reaches an audience beyond the intended one. It’s more than adult children feeling nostalgic. In the same interview, Munch has a hunch as to why. “The book is kind of an ideal, the way we hope things will happen,” he said in the same interview, “ It's the only one of my books that escaped being a children's book." 

“The book is kind of an ideal.” This story is about a mother caring for her growing boy and the love she shows him until the very end. The story speaks about unconditional love, even through difficult teen years and after moving away. So, yes, the content of the story itself is an ideal we all hope to have in our lifetime. But, I think Munch portrays this in an interesting way that can even prompt adults to tear up. And I think it is because of his use of repetition as his main rhetorical device.

Repetition as a rhetorical device is commonly found in children’s literature, along with other devices such as metaphors, similes, personification, hyperbole, alliteration, and onomatopoeia, according to this article. Repetition, according to Susan R. Gannon’s article, repetition creates suspense, rhythm, and gratification for young children in literature, but it also “is also a powerful means of generating meaning in fiction.” This meaning, I would argue, has something to do with a parent’s love for their child; something that impacts every human. The rhetorical use of repetition paints this love as unconditional love as well, which, like Munch notes, is an ideal that we all strive to have and give.

This story is told rather point-blank. The language is simple, the reading level sits just above an 8th-grade level (but with creative works, we know that’s not always an accurate statistic to look at), and many of the phrases are repeated. The frequent repetition creates not just a rhythm to keep the reader or listener interested, but the anaphora and epistrophe tell the story of growing up and of a mother’s love for her son. The mother’s actions are repeated throughout the story, despite the fact that her son is growing into an adult. The recurrent actions of the mother create a sentimental tone. It is through the repetition of specific words and phrases that Munch successfully portrays what it feels like to watch your child grow up and to love (and be loved) unconditionally. It’s in writing about this ideal that Munch was able to reach an audience beyond children.

One phrase that is repeated throughout the book is “He grew. He grew and he grew and he grew. He grew…” This phrase is used at the beginning of every age jump of the son in the story. The little boy jumps from being a newborn to age 2, then to 9, then to his teenage years, then into adulthood. These age gaps get wider and more ambiguous as the pages go on, but the phrase stays the same. I think the repetition of these words shows just how quickly the years go when raising a child. Your newborn turns into a two-year-old a few words later. Then your two-year-old turns into a nine-year-old a few words later. And it continues. But, despite how quickly time seems to be moving in the story, the mom is still present in her son’s life, even into his adulthood.

Her presence is shown through the other instance of anaphora in this book. The mother of the story is seen rocking her son “back and forth, back and forth, back and forth” repeatedly through the years. This specific phrase is found every time the mother sneaks into her son’s room to rock him to sleep. This phrase is more than an action. It repeatedly paints the image of the mother holding her son in the different stages of his life (even if it becomes a bit ridiculous when he’s an adult). It shows the steadfast presence of the mother in the son’s life, holding and supporting him no matter what. Every night, even if the boy was being mischievous or even if he lives across town, the mother was with the boy to tell him she loved him. This, I think, is an ideal we all yearn for: for someone to love us like that, or to love someone like that.

At the end of the story, the roles reverse as the old mother lays in her son’s arms. Instead of the mother rocking him back and forth, it is the son rocking his mother back and forth and sings to her as she passes away. In the story, the words “back and forth” are still repeated during this moment. This simple phrase of “back and forth” shows the impact of the mother’s presence in her son’s life affected him. The phrase is also repeated when the son goes into his daughter’s room to sing her to sleep. The repetition in the new contexts with the boy continues to show the idea of the steadfast presence of the mother in his life, even beyond death. 

Another use of repetition, and the most significant one, is the epistrophe of the lullaby. It is repeated throughout the book at the end of the pages when the boy is asleep. Munch mentioned on his website that the whole idea for the book stemmed from this lullaby he created. Themes of love and growth are found in this short lullaby. As with the rocking back and forth, the repetition of this lullaby throughout the pages shows the steadfastness of the mother. The rocking back and forth showed the mother’s presence in the boy’s life, but it goes beyond that. The repetition of the lullaby shows the constant presence of the mother’s love in the boy’s life as well. The rocking and the lullaby are always repeated together. Again, at the end of the book, when the mother is laying in her son’s arms, he finally sings the song to her. When she passes away, he rocks his daughter and sings her the same song his mother sang to him. This repetition shows that love can stretch beyond generations and is passed down.

Sentimentality is created when something in our lives that we enjoy or love repeats itself. Whether it’s a movie we enjoyed watching again and again or a certain type of bird that keeps popping up to remind us of the loved one we lost, sentimentality occurs when something continues to return that reminds us of something significant. If I Love You Forever didn’t repeat the phrases and the lullaby, what effect would it have on the reader? If the son didn’t repeat the same song at the end of the book, what effect would it have on the reader? The story wouldn’t be the same, and it wouldn’t have the rhythm and consistency we strive to have.

When I think back to the books I was read as a child, I think a lot about There’s a Wocket in My Pocket by Dr. Suess, or Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. I think one main goal of most children’s books is to get the child’s imagination running. To try to get the child to believe there’s a world where weird, mostly-friendly creatures live in the nooks of our houses, or worlds where pigeons can cause human mischief. I think the goal of I Love You Forever is quite the opposite of that. I think the goal of this book is trying to get children to look at those loved ones around them, to appreciate them, and to love them back unconditionally. Instead of trying to get us to look beyond this tactile world, it’s trying to get us to take a step back and look at our world. It’s reminding us to love until the very end. A reminder we all, big or small, need over and over again.

Emily Rux

Playwrights Using Creative Style

When I think of creative writing, I think of something fictional that usually contains a fair amount of dialogue. The first creative style piece that comes to my mind is a two-person play titled “Assault Toast” that I performed in high school Forensics. This piece is extremely easy to read and understand. The Flesch Reading Ease score is 73.88 and only four to five years of education are required for understanding. I think this is because there are a lot of one-word responses and the piece was written as a dialogue between to teenage sisters that are in an argument. The tone of the play would have been lost if it was any more difficult to read and understand. I think that creative writing can vary in its complexity and readability, but for pieces like the one I chose that are reliant on dialogue, simpler content and word choice are necessary.

“Assault Toast” was written by Bradley Walton, a comic book author turned playwright from Virginia. Walton began his career in the creative world by writing and illustrating comic books. This led to little success and he found himself working in the high school library of his alma mater. His love for acting and forensics during high school got him the job of forensics coach and play director. These new positions shifted his career as an author, and he quickly became a successful playwright with almost too many published works to count. He writes mostly short comedies for a small cast, which makes him a popular author in forensics competitions. “Assault Toast” fits that description. This play depicts a conversation between two sisters. The younger sister is attempting to modify the toaster such that it becomes a home security device. The older sister questions her logic and doubts her ability to perform such a crazy task. This dynamic continues throughout the entirety of the play and bickering that you would expect from teenage sisters is very prevalent.

This play uses a handful of rhetorical devices throughout the short excerpt that I have chosen. These include alliteration, repetition, amplification, and others. It also uses sentence structure to help emphasize the tone of the play and of each character. One character is questioning the logic of the other, so she uses short, to the point sentences to portray her confusion and irritation. The other sister tries to defend herself using larger terms and longer sentences to seem as if she knows what she is doing. The author of this play uses creative styles to allow for different emotions to be felt by the audience and by the characters in the play. To the audience, this is a comical depiction of an argument between sisters, but the sisters, especially the younger, are being serious.

Creative style strategies are used in play-writing as an attempt to keep viewers engaged in the performance the entire time, whether that is for a few minutes or a couple of hours. It is important for the success of the author and the performance to keep people anticipating what is coming next and willing to watch the whole thing. The creative style allows for an author to take advantage of sentence structure and word choice to keep the piece interesting and stay away from monotony. Plain or official styles wouldn’t be able to capture the interest of people in the way the creative style does. The use of a variety of rhetorical devices and sentence structure contribute the most to the creative style in this piece as well as in other plays or movie scripts. They are important devices used a lot in written dialogue and can even be picked out of spoken word. Creative style is necessary to escape to monotony of plain and official styles and allows the reader or viewer to fully immerse themselves in the work.

Kelsie K.

Keep Calm and Wash your Hands: A Look at the ‘Spokespoem’ of the Corona Virus

The year 2020 will be remembered in many ways, but across the entire world the pandemic will always be at the top of the list. During this time of crisis, Kitty O'Meara’s poem “In the Time of a Pandemic”  captures many of the emotions that people are feeling. Due to how viral it went I think it will be correlated with this time period in the future, a piece of literature that will be looked at for generations to come, to describe this life changing situation we are faced with. 

In order to understand the piece better, I did some research and slight online stalking of the author. I found she is a retired school teacher from Madison, Wisconsin. She wrote the poem in efforts to decrease the anxiety that she and those around her were feeling towards the virus. In an interview with Oprah Magazine she explains the purpose of her poem "It offers a story of how it could be, what we could do with this time." She had previously been writing on her blog, which she used as sort of an outlet for her feelings.  She said "I was getting kind of sad. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t help my friends. I was very worried about them. My husband said: ‘Write. Just write again.'" And so she did. And she wrote a poem that became known worldwide that everyone, from Deepak Chopra to Bella Hadid has shared. 

In attempts to understand how and why this poem became so viral, I analyzed the context and main elements that I believe contributed to its fame. They are separated and outlined below: 

Relatability  

Although how we are experiencing quarninteing looks vastly different depending on the person, we all share a common ground: we are all affected by this pandemic. Kitty’s poem highlights that similarity  and creates a sense of inclusion. This is a very new experience for many of us, which in turn leads to new feelings that many people don’t quite know how to describe. Kitty offers words that help to pinpoint what they are, and explain them in a positive way. While we are physically being separated and isolated, the poem creates a mutual understanding that most people can relate to. One way she archives this is by the use of anaphora (repetition of first word)  throughout the entire piece. The first word “And” helps add to that inclusion because it insinuates we are all in it together. If she would have used the word “or '' such as “or read books and listened, or rested and exercised, or made art and played” it would have separated the actors instead of creating one singular entity doing these actions, which is essentially all of us. It would lose the all-embracing feel it has. 

Story 

Her poem also reads similar to a story. There is an introduction, climax, and conclusion. It provides hope that there is not just an ending to the pandemic, but a happy ending, because she claims we will be better than before. It also flows nicely, because of the similar length in sentences and easy to read structure. There are no complex words or ideas used, which makes it accessible to most reading levels.

Location 

The poem was posted on her facebook, where sharing and spreading information is as easy as a click of a button. I believe that the popularity of a text such as this, is truly dependent on the platform in which it is posted on. People have been going to facebook to share their thoughts and feelings about the virus and this poem captured it perfectly. I also believe that Facebook is a major contributing factor to the conspiracy theories around the poem. With no fact checkers, and in the online economy that profits from the number of engagment it gets, fake news on facebook spreads like wildfire. These false claims, such as that it was written during the Spanish Flu influenza in 1919, quickly grabbed people's interest. In a time of such uncertainty and well... boredom, it is easy to gravitate towards false conceptions as a way of explaining the present, and using it to provide hope for the future. I believe that this leads to a loss of credibility, because people are seeing the poem and associating it with lies. In reality however, I would argue that the actual context that it was written, which was March of 2020, makes the author much more credible to be discussing the current crisis, as she is living it in real time. 

Kitty O'meara's poem, although written for herself and those closest to her, became known worldwide.  She wrote her honest and raw feelings, which resonated with thousands, and thus ensuring her work will create a lasting impact. 

 In the Time of a Pandemic

And people stayed home

and read books and listened

and rested and exercised

and made art and played

and learned new ways of being

and stopped

and listened deeper

someone meditated

someone prayed

someone danced

someone met their shadow

and people began to think differently

and people healed

and in the absence of people who lived in ignorant ways,

dangerous, meaningless and heartless,

even the earth began to heal

and when the danger ended

and people found each other

grieved for the dead people

and they made new choices

and dreamed of new visions

and created new ways of life

and healed the earth completely

just as they were healed themselves.

Kaitilyn Bestor