Customer Reviews

Essays That Will Get You into Law School (Barron's Essays That Will Get You Into Law School)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

If you're writing a personal statement for a law school in the top 14, stay away from this book. You can already write something more interesting than any of their sample essays.
The advice they give is fine, especially the general tips on how to organize your thoughts. But the book is 90% a collection of essays, and they are uniformly atrocious.
Almost all of the essays are variations on the theme of 'experience in my life that made me want to be a lawyer.' This is not the kind of essay the admissions committee at Harvard or Yale wants to hear. They want an interesting look at the kind of person you are, not a cheesy story about how working for a state senator made you realize the importance of community service. Essays are not the time to list your accomplishments. That's why Yale's application doesn't have you fill out any forms, but instead asks for a resume.
If you're looking for good essays to get your creative juices flowing, avoid this book like the plague.

This book is an excellent guide for how to structure and write your personal statement. Some of the tips and writing exercises were a little too remedial to be helpful, but the authors really helped me understand what admissions officers are looking for. By following the guidelines in this book, I was able to make the final draft of my essay much better than the first version was. As this book points out, the key is to write your essay so that it not only grabs the attention of the reader like a commercial would, but also to make it memorable enough so that the admissions officer still remembers your essay after finishing reading a hundred other people's personal statements. This book helped me make the writing in my essay tighter, better organized, and more coherent.

As for the forty sample essays, I was amazed at how dull and boring many of them were. But that actually boosted my confidence level, because I realized that my essay had a good chance of making a positive impression on an admissions officer.

If you need help writing your essay, this book is excellent. It's much better than Boykin Curry's "Essays that Worked for Law Schools."

As someone who works privately with students, helping them with admissions essays for law school, I highly recommend this book. When students call me in regard to assistance with their essays, I recommend that they first buy this book as a means to get started. The guidelines and essays have helped my clients not only to gather their thoughts, but also to organize and write them into interesting and creative essays. By the time they come to me for feedback and editing, they are well on the way to getting into the law school of their choice.

This book is an excellent resource. It includes tips for writing your essay as well as 40 sample essays.

There is criticism from other reviewers that the 40 sample essays aren't that good. I liked some of them, but I will freely admit that many of them completely turned me off. But, we have to remember two things. First, these essays are not written by professional writers, but by law school applicants - a successful law school essay is not necessarily going to be a brilliant work of literature. Second, we don't have to like the essays or think they're very good, someone on the admissions board of a top school already read each of these essays and admitted the student. In other words, the essays target audience liked the essay and that is why it's a good essay. This book's first chapter is called "Assess Your Audience."

My essay was mostly written before I bought this book. But it's always those last finishing touches that are the hardest and take the longest. I was at the point with my essay were I wasn't really satisfied with it, but I didn't know how to fix it. This book has many tips - many of which are elemental and basic and many I chose to ignore. The decision to reject the books tips made me more aware of the structure of my essay and confirmed how I wanted to present myself.

I also found the essays very helpful. Your own essay can be too personal to analyze objectively. In reading the other essays, especially the weaker ones, I found aspects I didn't like and was then better able to review my own essay to see if I made the same mistakes.

When I finished my essay and finished this book I was very happy with my essay. I even sent it to a professional graduate school essay editor for tips on what was still needed and it was sent back to me because the editor said it was ready to submit. When you're preparing to apply to law school, there is so much going on and so many things to keep straight I found that this book helped me feel there was order to one aspect of that process. That, in itself, is useful.

I bought this book because at one crazy point, I actually thought of going to law school. I came to my senses eventually and I ended up applying to PhD programs in biology. I thought I wasted money on this book, but then I gave it a chance and it actually gives great overall advice on writing effective personal statements for ANY purpose. Graduate schools all look for the same thing ultimately, they want to know what you are about and they want to know why you chose your career path. This book is great because it gives you examples of people coming from all sorts of background and you can draw on all their experiences to put together your own essay. I even stole a line from one of the essays because it applied to my own life and I wouldn't have found a better way to say it. I'm going to Columbia University starting this fall, so I guess my personal statement wasn't half bad. This book made the job a lot easier, especially if you have writer's block like I did. It really gives you a starting point.

If you are like me and had no clue where to begin writing a personal essay (the personal ones are always the hardest, this book offers a step by step outline of how to brainstorm subjects and how to organize your thoughts, write and outline and eventually the essay(s).

I really needed this because I, like you, will have to write a number of essays, depending on how many schools we are applying to. I have all these ideas and life experiences, but did not know how to organize them, let alone write anything coherent! This book helped me tremendously with organization and perspective and put me on a path to writing 4 sucessful essays.

I recently faced the challenge of writing my personal statement for law school. When I sat to down to write it, I found that I didn't really know where to begin. I found this book useful not because of the writing tips it gives (I thought those could have been more helpful) but because it gives a whole bunch of example essays. If you have no clue where to begin, buy this book. If you have a pretty good idea and are just looking for tips to help you polish it up, you would probably be better off just talking to your pre-law advisor. He/she knows exactly what makes a good personal statement.

The general tips provided about writing your personal statement are good, but are generally common sense to anyone who has taken a argumentative writing class and/or a good english class. Most books about the overall application process include these tips.

As for the essays included in this book, they are applicable to the average applicant, that is unless the average applicant has worked for five years in the Sudan raising orphans, or escaped genecide as a child. It would be more helpful if this book included essays that were written by applicants with a more normal work/life experience. This book was a complete waste of my time. I would suggest instead to read "How to get into top law schools" and then focus your reading on the adcom's quotes.

I found this book to be of only limited value. As we all know, essays are only one aspect of the whole law school admissions game, and it is therefore misleading to suggest that writing great essays alone is enough to differentiate you from all the other highly qualified applicants out there. For essays alone, Kaufman's book was pretty helpful. But another book I also purchased, Richard Montauk's "How to Get Into the Top Law Schools" was ultimately much more comprehensive and useful in guiding me through the admissions process in its entirety.

The new edition of "Essays That Worked for Law Schools" by Curry and Baer is more up-to-date and has better essays, I thought.