Ep 66: How to Use Multiple Stories in Your Law School Personal Statement
Today we're going to be talking about how to weave together multiple stories in your law school personal statement. You should always try to avoid the single-story narrative but you also don't want to try to tell 10 different stories in 2 pages. How should you weave together these multiple stories?
Episode Highlights
To show multiple sides of yourself in a nuanced way, you have to tell more than one story. However, this doesn’t mean eight or so stories. You cannot fit eight stories into your personal statement.
3-4 main stories (main points) are recommended. Not all of those stories are main. Some of those stories are just cameos, as I like to say. They just make little appearances. It might be one to two sentences as an aside or as a detail, but you're really only going to have three or four main stories.
Engage in the art of storytelling, instead of showing. Admissions are reading hundreds and hundreds, thousands of essays, and you want them to connect to your writing. You want them to feel something happy, sad, angry, but they're not going to feel anything if you're writing dispassionate sentences that have no emotional feeling.
OUTLINE! Without outlining, your stories will be disjointed and admissions will wonder how you got from this story to the other.
You need to be able to weave your stories together.You must think about transitions before you start writing your essay, and this starts in your outline. Remember this is a two page personal statement. We cannot go through your entire life.
Tip: One of the easiest ways to start your personal statement is to open up with a story. The literary term for this, is called in medias res. An example would be to open up with dialogue.
Remember that you can also fit your other stories within your addendum, diversity statement, or supplemental essays.
Tweetable Quotes
“You don’t wanna reduce yourself to a single story narrative….We tend to focus on trauma, and that robs us of talking about a lot of the nuance and a lot of the joys that we may have experienced in a lot of places of strength and power. It robs us of so many things that we bring to the table, especially in admissions context, if we are forced to reduce our story and reduce who we are to just that one single story narrative.”
Resources
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