The rewrite of my rewrite...need some feedback! Forum

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Lady_In_Red

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The rewrite of my rewrite...need some feedback!

Post by Lady_In_Red » Mon Jan 03, 2011 11:41 am

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Last edited by Lady_In_Red on Sat Jan 08, 2011 12:41 am, edited 1 time in total.

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verklempt

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Re: The rewrite of my rewrite...need some feedback!

Post by verklempt » Tue Jan 04, 2011 1:35 pm

This is a much improved version, and you do a better job interweaving the opening accident into the rest of the PS. My suggestions:

* The first paragraph tense is a little awkward in that you mostly use past tense. But when you travel backwards in time -- in this case, shifting from the moment you saw your counselor to the decisions that led you to that route -- you may want to switch into past perfect to signal a reverse jump. Maybe by saying "the role I had played" or "I had noticed." Experiment and see how it sounds to you. A little goes a long way, but can help the reader get the chronology straight.

* Second paragraph. I like the introspection here. I do think the last sentence could be stronger, less passive, more "I resolved that day to take action."

* Third paragraph: "seeking for" is not colloquial use. You want "seeking" or "looking for" or some other verb. Also, I don't think you just wanted opportunities to be proactive, but to be proactive in a way that would benefit your community. You might want to say this explicitly. The last part of this paragraph is kind of marshy. We all get poverty. Instead of going into so much detail that has really nothing to do with you, sum it up in a line and then explain how this affected you and why you felt impelled to take action. In the next paragraph you say you felt that this problem was a burden, but I'm not understanding why. Had you never noticed this problem before the camp? Had you believed you could do nothing about it? It's kind of a leap to go from a camping accident to volunteering in the South Bronx -- the reader is wlling to make that jump but you have to offer a helping hand.

* Fourth paragraph. Now we're talking about YOU and you gloss over this in a few quick lines. This is your chance to show-not-tell, and yet I can't really tell what you did except I get a vague sense it was something positive. Help the reader see that you went above and beyond and had an impact. This is also the place where you can lay the ground for your closing paragraph by indicating why a legal background would enable you to be more effective in this environment, along the lines of "I could help people up to a certain point but soon realized they really needed legal advice to deal with landlord/banks, or someone to go to court with them" etc.

* Closing paragraph. I like the first sentence because it revisits your opening, but after that, there's a big chunk of paragraph that needs to go. Please don't get bogged down in the whole "make a difference" and "social injustice" shtick. You can't imagine how tired adcomms get when they have to read variations on this theme, over and over and over. I'd expand the first sentence, then skip straight to "A legal career will enable me to help break the poverty cycle by providing services" (don't repeat "legal" twice). Also, "a sorry end" is a little over-dramatic, don't you think?

I don't hate contractions as much as some people here do, but I would not use Latin abbreviations (e.g., i.e.) but rather spell them out.

Lady_In_Red

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Re: The rewrite of my rewrite...need some feedback!

Post by Lady_In_Red » Tue Jan 04, 2011 2:29 pm

Thanks verklempt. That's excellent feedback. Any more takers?

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