Essay Guideline

Whether you’re submitting a personal statement, a statement of purpose, or a diversity essay, make sure to follow these rules:

Rule #1: Edit and Proofread, Then Proofread Again Your grammar, spelling, and punctuation must be flawless. When in doubt, pullout those old standbys The Chicago Manual of Style and Strunk & White. If grammar, spelling, and punctuation aren’t your strong points, enlist a friend to help (and give you a tutorial, while you’re at it). There’s no excuse for a college graduate to mess this up. And beware the spell-check trap — it won’t catch “right” when you should have written “write,” and it won’t catch your “commitment to pubic service.” (You laugh, but I saw that typo as a law review editor.) Always have a second pair of eyes proofread your essays before you send them off.

Rule #2: Nothing Cutesy Anything cutesy or gimmicky will make admissions officers groan. Stay away from the following:

Essays in the form of poetry
Essays in the form of a legal brief (”For all the reasons cited above, the admissions committee should admit Petitioner to Slamdunk Law School.”)
Essays in the form of an obituary (”Tracy Johnson died the most respected jurist of her time.”)
Essays in the form of an interview
Crayons, construction paper, perfume, or illustrated essays, no matter how sophisticated

Rule #3: No Legalisms You’re not a lawyer yet, so your use of legal concepts or terminology will most likely demonstrate that you have no idea what you’re talking about, not to mention the fact that legal writing is considered god-awful by the rest of the world, including admissions officers. Many applicants, for example, refer to a company or a person violating someone’s right to free speech, when, in fact, the First Amendment applies only to government restrictions on speech. And by all means, steer clear of anything in Latin.

Rule #4: Show, Don’t Tell Back up any general statements with examples and anecdotes. If you write, “The student presidency taught me that leadership means more than delegating,” tell us how you learned that lesson. What were the conflicts and problems you faced? If you write, “I have excellent time-management skills,” back up that statement by pointing out that you graduated in the top 10 percent of an engineering program that 40 percent of engineering freshmen drop.

Rule #5: Respect Page Limits and Other Minutiae If a school gives you a page or word limit, abide by it. And follow the spirit of the rule as well as the letter — don’t get too sneaky with fonts, margins, and line spacing. Admissions officers won’t cut you any slack if your essay comes in under the page limit but makes them go cross-eyed because the font or line spacing is so small. If a school doesn’t specify a length, a good rule of thumb is two to three pages, double-spaced, in eleven-point Times New Roman, with one-inch margins all around. When in doubt, shorter is better than longer. As an admissions officer buddy of mine likes to say: “The vast, vast, vast majority of just-out-of-college applicants (almost all applicants, really) are not interesting enough to fill six pages. Show me that you understand my time is valuable, and show me that you understand how to pick out what’s really important.”

Make sure to put your name and Social Security number in a header and page numbers in a footer, just in case your file goes splat and has to be reassembled. Also, identify in the header what essay question you’re answering, if you’re given more than one option 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 added those titles in the appendix essays so that I could refer to them easily in this chapter.

Don’t submit pages that are crumpled, stained, or smell like pot smoke — most admissions officers really aren’t looking for that contact high. Really, your essay shouldn’t smell like any kind of smoke.

And finally, if you’re getting too close to your material and think you’re losing perspective, turn to the sample essays in the appendix to keep your big-picture objective in mind. Can you see how much more engaging and revealing the good ones are?

Copyright © 2006 Anna Ivey

Excerpt
An excerpt from the book The Ivey Guide to Law School Admissions
by Anna Ivey
Published by Harcourt; April 2005;$14.00US; 0-15-602979-0
Copyright © 2006 Anna Ivey

Anna Ivey, JD, served as dean of admissions at the University of Chicago Law School. She now runs Anna Ivey Admissions Counseling, a counseling firm for college, business school, and law school applicants. She divides her time between Boston and Orlando. Please visit her website at http://www.annaivey.com.

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You should be cautious when you place the order at essay-writing services. There are too many companies that offer their clients the possibility to purchase so called, genuine, well-written essay papers at the low cost. Some of these sites may offer pre-written services. In this case the client may wind up with a plagiarized, resold paper.

Some web-sites provide their client with so called order option. Yet, what if the company does not operate in an English-speaking country? So many of them claim that they are located in the countries where English language is a native one. What happens if the customers are cheated?

Apparently it happens sometimes. For example, recently a Loughbouroiugh University professor purchased several essays online and found out that they were of highly poor quality. He placed the order for the essay on copyright law.

For this purpose he asked several of his students to order the papers at several online writing services. The prices differ from the company to the company, but they were in the range of 230-350 USD.

Despite the fact, that the companies claimed their papers were genuine, custom-designed, and fully referenced papers, the results raised some doubts as to this fact. The papers delivered were of the poor quality. Even those essays that somehow managed to answer the questions had some serious errors and misrepresentation of the facts.

The professor claims that the papers were imbedded with platitudes and generalities, and did not answer the specific questions. One of the points of the criticism was poor English, which certainly in turn raised the questions whether these papers were designed and written by someone who was a native speaker. Undoubtedly, it was written by someone who was not proficient in English and whose capacitates to research were more than limited. Also, old references and outdated information have been provided. Some of the papers even contained plagiarized materiel.

Despite these facts the professor claimed that he would have been unable to detect that the papers were not written by his students. So how can you distinguish real American site from a foreign one? Let us give you some tips:

First look whether then company has the support service representatives. The absence of the support service representatives is an indication that the company is located in some other country that the one, advertised on its website.

Second, do not be tempted and succumbed by low prices advertised by some of the companies. If the company offers you the essays for less than 10 or 11 dollars per page, you should realize that the writer receives only small fraction of the price, mentioned. Certainly, you can understand that none of highly skilled and experienced writer would research , design and compose the paper for less than 10 USD per page.

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Winston Maikingston is a staff writer for DissertationsExperts.com, a leading provider of dissertation consulting and custom-designed term papers on the variety of subjects. DisssertationsExperts.com has been providing its services to clients in more than 70 countries of the world for more than five years.

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