Strengthening Your Law School Personal Statement: Voice, Transitions, and Formatting
By Alice Foley, Director of Pre-Law Programming
Welcome to the second part of our mini-series: Strengthening Your Writing Style! In the last blog post, Sydney spoke about the difference that strong essays can make for law school applicants, flow, and word choice.
As a former law school admissions officer, I have spent plenty of time reading law school admissions essays. Trust me when I say, there are some very simple ways to avoid annoying or boring your admissions reader. I’m excited to share my experience with you and help you create stronger law school admissions essays.
In this blog post, we’re going to talk about tips for making sure that you’re using the proper voice as you’re writing (active vs. passive), transitions, and formatting!
Would you rather listen to this blog post? Listen to Strengthening Your Writing Style - Part 2 on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts!
Active and Passive Voice
At some point in time in your life, you have learned active and passive voice. When you learned it, it is very likely that you were told that active voice is always preferable to passive voice. Before we even get started on distinguishing what they are, I want to tell you that that is not true. Each of them has its purpose, and they are each useful when used effectively.
Active voice is when the subject of the sentence does something. Examples include: “The girl wrote the essay.” or “They submitted their law school applications.” It’s pretty simple and straightforward. An easy way to remember this is that active is subject-focused.
Passive voice is a little more complicated. In this voice, the verb is acting on the subject. What that means is that the subject is not as important in the sentence, so you won’t be leading with that. This typically means that you will have two verbs in the sentence. An easy way to remember this is that passive is action-focused.
One verb is a form of “to be.” These include is, are, were, etc. The second is a past participle of the main verb (like “written” to “wrote”). Examples include: “The essay was written by the girl.” or “Their law school applications were submitted.”
You’ll notice that there is a big difference in the length of the sentences between active and passive voice. Active typically takes less space.
When you are starting to write your essays, especially when you’re coming from academia, you may find that you’re slipping into passive voice. This is because you’re more focused on the thing that happened than the person that did it.
In law school admissions essays, active voice is going to be more beneficial. You want your sentences to be clear and direct. As I said before, active voice also takes fewer words, which can be helpful when you have page limits.
Another reason that active voice works well in your essays is that it is typically used for persuasive writing. If you think about op-eds in a newspaper, the person (subject) is important there; it’s not just about what happened. This calls for active voice.
Your admissions essays are also persuasive pieces of writing. The whole point of your admissions essays is to convince the admissions committee that you should be admitted to their law school. You’re the star of the essay, and you’re sharing part of your life with admissions. You as a subject are important, and that’s what calls for active voice.
Another thing to note is that active voice is typically more interesting to read. If I’m spending a lot of time reading admissions essays, they can start to get boring after a certain amount of time. But when you’re the tenth in the stack and are written in active voice rather than passive voice, you’ve got my attention. And it’s never a bad idea to do something that will make your essay memorable to an admissions officer.
Now, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use passive voice at all when you’re writing. It does still have a place in your law school career!
There are several situations where passive voice is the better choice. It is going to be your best option when the subject is not important. You may not know who or what did something, and that means they shouldn’t be the focus.
As a future lawyer, this is particularly important. Passive voice is a great strategy to downplay or avoid responsibility for something. In passive voice, you can say something like, “The emails were deleted.” We don’t know who deleted them, and we’re trying to keep from placing responsibility on a particular subject. If you put that into active voice (“She deleted those emails.”), you can feel the finger-pointing.
The other place that this shows up is in academic and research papers. As I said before, most of the time the thing you’re writing about is more important than who is doing it. It doesn’t matter who put the rats in the maze; that they were in it is the point.
The Significance of Transitions
I know that up to now I’ve talked about you not having a lot of space, but transitions are essential. If you write me one or two pages and there are no transitions, I am confused.
Most personal statements, when done well, are taking your reader on a journey. The goal is that they are engaged and that they are happy to be with you throughout the journey. If you don’t have transitions in place, that journey is really awkward. It’s like running into walls or locked doors.
There are some major categories of transitions that you should be aware of while writing.
The first big one is something that emphasizes what you’ve just written. These are words like “obviously.” For example: “I am fairly useless before I have had my coffee in the morning. Obviously, I make time in the morning to have coffee before I can interact with humans.”
The next type is adding something to what you’ve just written. These are your “because of” or “in addition to” statements. To keep going on my prior example, you could say: “In addition, I set aside 15 minutes every morning to work on a crossword.”
The next type is something that contrasts with what you’ve just written. This includes words like “alternatively” or “despite.” For example: “Although I set aside time in my morning, I didn’t have enough time to finish the crossword.
Finally, the most common type of transition is one that places the next topic in time. These are words like “first,” “then,” or “after.”
What I often see is that time and contrast show up most often in personal and diversity statements. It can be really easy to get a little lazy as you’re writing out your story to use the same transition words because of this.
Saying “this happened, then this happened, then this happened” is accurate, but it is very boring to read. Instead, make it a point to vary the transition words and phrases that you’re using. You can use long phrases or short phrases; you can pull on something from the paragraph before.
It’s one of those things, much like the passive voice, that will make your reader bored if you don’t take the time to make those changes.
Essay Formatting
I have talked about this on many occasions. You need to follow the directions for your essays.
At the end of the day, your application essay is a test. It’s a way that admissions officers gauge how you follow rules when given some leeway.
Every law school is going to make things a little differently. Some are going to give you a very specific set of instructions, down to what size the margins should be. If they give you all of that, you need to follow the directions.
If the school doesn’t give you all of those instructions, what you do beyond the length requirement is up to you. However, you should still be making good judgment calls when it comes to formatting. For example, if they don’t explicitly state that you need to make your essay double-spaced, you should still be making it double-spaced. This is not the time to be creative with formatting; most of the time, standard things are fine.
Specifically when it comes to margins, if a school does not give you directions, assume they want 1” margins. Here’s why: Your essays are going to be read in conjunction with every other piece of your application. When you’re reading through those, it becomes very obvious when someone has bumped margins out to give themselves more space. I understand why it happens, but pushing the bounds of the directions that you’ve been given is not something I would suggest.
Final Thoughts
This has been a long blog, so thank you for sticking around! I promise that all of these little things do make a difference to your admissions readers, which in turn makes a difference in your admissions decision.
We went over active and passive voice (please use active!), changing up the transitions throughout your essays, and essential things to remember when formatting your essays. I hope that this blog has been helpful, and don’t be afraid to reach out if you have any questions!
The team at S. Montgomery Admissions Consulting is here to support you through this law school application cycle! Whether it's through personalized one-on-one counseling, our Essay Editing Combo Plans, or just downloading our free Essential Guide to Applying to Law School, there is definitely something we can do for you to help make this process a little bit easier.
As always, feel free to reach out to us at hello@smontgomeryconsulting.com with any of your questions! You can also submit a question to be answered on our weekly Break Into Law School® Podcast, streaming wherever your favorite podcast service is.