Today we're going to be talking about your writing style in your writing for law school admissions. So often we focus on the content but we neglect the importance of writing style in delivering the strongest personal and diversity statements. 

In part 1, we're going to focus on flow and word choice. We'll dive into some writing mechanics that you can apply to in your essay and overall writing.

Episode Highlights

Flow

• Think of flow as if the reader is taking a trip. Sometimes you go on a trip and you're like, “Wow we're here already.” That's how you want your essay to flow. You don't want it to be like, “Oh my god. Are we there yet? How much more of this essay do I have to read?”

• You want to avoid being choppy and having sentences that are short and disjoint. This could happen from a lack of transition.

• One piece of advice I would give is to read your essay out loud to someone else so you can hear possible awkward sentences. 

Grammar Mechanisms

• When you have thoughts that might be related and they're short sentences, consider joining them with a semicolon.

• I am not a huge fan of parenthesis in this kind of writing. I think an em dash as opposed to parenthesis, is probably a little bit more elegant on the page–it just looks a little nicer.

• You do not use a comma to connect two independent clauses without a conjecture such as, and, or, but, for, etc. 

• If you have two independent clauses that are related to each other, you can use a semicolon. There's a lot of rules in terms of when you use commas with an and or but, and so you wanna look at that.

• You don't wanna use a semicolon where you should have used a comma. You cannot use a semicolon to connect an independent and a dependent clause. 

Cadence and Varied Rhythm

• All of your sentences shouldn't be short, but all of your sentences shouldn't be long. You want to have that variety of a mix of short sentences and long sentences purposefully

• You want to think about how you emphasize certain points. For instance, I can have some lovely flowing long sentences, but now I want to get the reader's attention with a shorter sentence. You want to be intentional about the speed and the rhythm. 

Word Choice

• You want to have a little bit of elevated tone of seriousness and purpose. You want to have that elevated writing style, but you don't want to be too dense.

• Quite often people feel like they need to use every big word that they’ve ever learned in their entire life and pack them into these super dense sentences that make them sound so smart. Wordiness is an issue, It just makes your writing confusing.

• You don't need to over explain, but admissions just needs to not be confused. The goal really is to just write enough that they're not confused. You don't need large or fancy language to get into law school. The language that you have is completely fine. 

• Write professionally and clearly.

Emotions

• Your personal statement is a narrative piece of writing. It’s a journey that you're taking admissions on, and that journey should include some kind of emotion.

• Admissions should  go through some emotion, any emotion, during your personal statement. 

• Oftentimes I get a lot of personal statements that are devoid of emotion in a way that doesn't actually make me feel like you're passionate about what you're talking about. A dry and boring personal statement is not great.

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