Close to final draft--T14 PS--Please critique! Forum

[fishtails]

Thanks for everyone's help

[sfamor]

I would suggest tying the color guard somehow into your final paragraph. As it is now it seems like have two essays- one about what you learned in the color guard and one about your experiences post-grad. See if there's some way to add in another sentence or two at the end to try to tie it all together.

[kublaikahn]

..

[john1990]

I just performed on the world stage—in front of the black curtain backdrop, I saw the “Winter Guard International Championship Finals” banner written in white, that I had seen on past competition DVDs.
Or some thing along those lines
Reminded –me- how of far I had come
from the crowd, and in awe
-a/the- marching band or is this a title?
rookies, and ended
through -the- mall
winterguard, and then
now to ineligible -delete "to"
It has shaped
It was only with those lessons that I was able to graduate from XXXXXXXXXXXX. The past experiences there dared inspired me to challenge myself and graduate early
delete the purple words

whatever that came/comes
carry apply those
perseverance in the face of challenging – I also used the phrase “in the face of” in my rough draft but deleted it because im not sure how schools across the country will respond to idioms. I would work on this sentence
I have gained a good

I like your essay, it is applicable, and answers why you want to go to law school. You have a great ending too.
If you could edit my PS I would appreciate it
http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/v ... 8&t=168747

[jessie]

Here's my critique. This is already pretty polished in terms of errors, so a lot of this is stylistic opinion which you may not agree with.

"Flag silks glided and twisted around my body. Sabers and rifles flew in the air."

This is more of a stylistic preference than an actual correction, but in this case I don't think the repeated use of personification makes the statement more evocative. It just makes it more flowery. People throw flags, sabers, and rifles. They don't fly.

"I had just performed."

"I did not even dare to dream of becoming one of them."

I'm not a fan of that statement. You were in the marching band doing winterguard so whyever wouldn't you dream of achieving the highest level? Maybe instead say that it was a place you could only dream of reaching.

"Indoor" is one word, unless it's always hyphenated like that when you're talking about colorguard?

"I started as one of the clumsiest rookies." A good place to show a little bit of what you're talking about. A little one-sentence snippet about funny mistakes you made could grab the reader's attention and emphasize how far you came with hard work and practice.

"... and then went to my part-time job." What was the part-time job. If it's something that could potentially be interesting or evokes the image of a really hard job, I would add it.

"I had to make the best of it and recover on stage and off." Take out the "and off" since you're trying to emphasize the fact that you had to get over mistakes in the middle of performing. There's no reason to add that you also had to get over mistakes in practice, since that's normal.

"Colorguard taught me what it meant to make sacrifices, be disciplined, and work tirelessly." "Work tirelessly" is a very flowery way to say "work hard" and doesn't end that set well. I would just stick with the first two, actually. If your disciplined and having to make sacrifices the fact that you're working hard is already stated. Adverbs suck unless you reall need them.

"It was only with those lessons that I was able to graduate from ..." To me, that statement seems like you were only able to graduate because you were disciplined to work harder than the average person, which I don't think is a good statement to make. It gives the image that had you only worked as hard as everyone else you wouldn't have graduated at all.

You have a tense discrepency in the paragraph that starts "During my time working as ..." suggests the past, yet you then proceed to talk about it in the present. If you are still currently working there, I would use the phrasing "I currently work as a Procurement Specialist ...". If not, change the sentences that follow to the past tense.

In the next paragraph you talk about your intensified desire to pursue a legal education but you never really told us what got you interested in the first place. Was it your work at XXXX or was it something you'd known for a while?

There's another tense discrepency in this paragraph as well. You say that it "Intensified my desire to pursue my legal education" but then you talk about those things in the present tense. I understand that you might still be doing them, but if you're talking about the point at which they inspired you, they should be in past tense.

"The difficulty in adjusting agreement terms to adequately reflect rapidly developing and changing technologies" reads like an ITT Tech commercial. You don't need both "rapidly developing" and "changing". You also don't need "adequately".

"I have gained a good understanding ..." Too wordy. I would take out either "have" or "good", both of which are unnecessary for the sentence.

I like how you talk about your frustration with one problem area in your job and how you think you could help companies in the future with this problem as a lawyer.