Lesson Two: Your Audience—Who Are You Writing For?

One of the most fundamental aspects of marketing is to "know your audience." While you are not creating a billboard of yourself or creating social media advertisements for yourself, you are trying to market yourself as an ideal candidate for each program. In other words, you are selling each school on why it should accept you.

And with the essays, it is not enough to just write the essays as you want to—you need to know who you are writing for and what your audience’s expectations are.

Let that sink in.

You are not writing the essay for yourself or for how you think it should be. You are writing the essay for a very specific audience, and you need to tailor it accordingly.

So, who are you writing for, and how should you write for them?

It Depends. But Not by Much

The exact details of who will read your application and in what order can vary depending on the school, but typically, your target audience boils down to two types of people:

·      Administrative Staff (including admissions directors)

·      Faculty

Some schools will have multiple people reading your application, some will have a “funnel” system, where the number of people reading your application depends on the quality of it, and some will even have students and alumni help. To consider two specific schools as examples:

·      Yale: A member of the Admissions Office will review the application first. According to Yale, there is no cut-off point for GPA or test scores; however, it is reasonable to assume that some applications can easily be dismissed for various statistical reasons. Next, a small number of applications are directly admitted with the approval of one faculty member. Other applications are sent for further review and evaluation by three law school professors, who evaluate the application based on their criteria. These three professors form the final basis of who gets admitted, who gets waitlisted, and who gets rejected.

·      UC-Berkeley: The Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid will first review the application based on the program’s admission criteria, which includes GPA, LSAT, essays, and letters of recommendation. The dean will admit or deny some applicants and send the rest for more extended consideration to an Admissions Committee composed of faculty and students. Faculty make final decisions, while students offer consultive advice.

Although the specific details of who reads your application and in what order can vary, some general writing advice will apply to almost every law program. We will cover specific writing details in the next section, but there is one very important thing we want to emphasize here right now. This piece of advice, alone, can save your application from the “reject” pile.

You Are Not Writing for a Federal Court. You Are Writing for a Law School Committee.

“You can tell when someone is writing in a tone or voice that is not their own.  I find a lack of authenticity jarring – we want people to be themselves in the application process.” -Nefyn Meissner, Senior Assistant Director of Admissions at Harvard

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One of the worst decisions you can make is to assume that because you are applying to law school, you should write as a lawyer would. This is not only an approach that will not help you, it will harm you. There is an enormous difference between how a lawyer writes and how you should write.

A lawyer needs to make a specific point about a case in as precise, clear, and certain language as possible. A lawyer is not writing expecting the reader—or listener, in a courtroom—to give him or her the benefit of the doubt, but that they will have their language parsed apart for specific nuances or differing interpretations. As a result, lawyers do not have the leeway to do anything other than write in an exact style that often results in dry language no one would use in any other setting.

You, however, do. You are writing essays for a dean or faculty member to better understand you, your motivations, and your perspective on the world. An admissions officer at a school like Harvard may read over a thousand applications per year—if your writing is dry and weak, there will be a thousand other students ready to leapfrog you, no matter what you write about.

And what do these readers want? Nefyn Meissner said as much in the quote above—authenticity.

And authenticity, as it relates to you, means in your voice, with your story, and with your style. If you like to tell a story with parentheses (as if making an aside like this), go for it. If you feel that your internship experience in your small town meant more to your career progression than your first job out of college, write about it. So long as you are authentic, you are right.

As you write, keep this in mind. Explore who you are, what guides you, and what your story is. Do not make it overly factual, dry, or written like legalese. Make it compelling. Make it gripping.

Make it worth reading, not just analyzing.

We will show you how to do this in the next section, in which we will discuss how to approach each essay, regardless of prompt.