Law School Personal Statement Samples Page 4
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10a quote by some famous person whose work you have never read or barely
encountered. Spend some time unpacking the various levels and resonances of the
quote in relation to your life and goals.
o List reasons you should be admitted. This structure, like the chronological structure,
needs a unifying theme, or it is completely boring. It is best to avoid this structure.
How to Write a Strong Introduction
Attention-grabbing material: Hook them with a remarkable or a life-changing
experience, an anecdote, or a question that will be answered by your law school
personal statement.
Benefits: Make your essay worth their time to read.
Credentials: Build ethos.
Direction: Tell them your thesis and structure.
How to Write a Strong Conclusion
Discover something new for your audience that you set up along the way.
The conclusion is the final chord of music resolved. It should pull together the
different parts of the personal statement, rephrase main ideas, interpret the
importance of the choice of topics, point towards the future, and give the cue for
ending with a rhetorical flourish.
Appeal to your Audience
Using pathos will appeal to your audience’s feelings and emotions and make them
more sympathetic to you. Several ways to use pathos include: writing your story as a
quest narrative (which also adds mythos), asking the audience to think of a time
when…, using rhetorical questions, using suspense, describing a great
disappointment with details but ending with a positive lesson learned, describing a
great joy.
Your audience will be one of three types of learners: visual, auditory, or kinesthetic.
Try to appeal to all of these by working in visual descriptions for visual learners,
discussing times in which you excelled in oral communication for auditory learners,
and discussing specific ways in which you were active for kinesthetic learners
(kinesthetic learners are those who learn by physically doing rather than reading or
listening). Your audience will primarily self-select as visual learners, because these
typically include people who are good at reading. The bottom line is this: Vivid,
active language is crucial.
Try to make the reader feel he or she has taken a short mental vacation. Whisk the
reader away into your world. Make the reader smile.
If you think the audience can’t relate to a specific piece of evidence you have given
to back up your claim that you should be admitted, try to describe it so that the
audience can feel connected imaginatively. This applies to describing your work in a
different nation and culture, for example.
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