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Bump

Any response is greatly appreciated

Just to clarifying, the title is just trying to get people looking at the post. Bump again.

please folks

There is no need to bump, you are still on the first page. Not many people are looking at PS right now, they're studying for the LSAT.

Your PS is good, it shows you think and have an inward focus. The only thing is that it talks a lot about your family farm but doesn't specifically link that farm to your capstone project. I am assuming you are black and the school will obviously have access to that but we do not, it explain the farm comparison. Lastly it probably goes without saying but this only works for the college you mention in the essay, if you want to change it to a park for other schools that could be an option but I would probably rewrite it.

Natem137 wrote:There is no need to bump, you are still on the first page. Not many people are looking at PS right now, they're studying for the LSAT.

Your PS is good, it shows you think and have an inward focus. The only thing is that it talks a lot about your family farm but doesn't specifically link that farm to your capstone project. I am assuming you are black and the school will obviously have access to that but we do not, it explain the farm comparison. Lastly it probably goes without saying but this only works for the college you mention in the essay, if you want to change it to a park for other schools that could be an option but I would probably rewrite it.

Thanks for the reply! Actually, I'm not black, I talk about the capstone project as an example of the pursuits I enjoyed in college that were spurred from my early life.

I am not sure where you're going with the idea that I would have to rewrite it for other schools... I'm in fact not even applying to either my school or this neighboring school. What did you mean by this?

I would check to see if the school you talk about first has a law school. If it does other schools don't really want to hear about how you have an attachment to that school.

Natem137 wrote:I would check to see if the school you talk about first has a law school. If it does other schools don't really want to hear about how you have an attachment to that school.

Maybe I didn't wrote this well enough that my idea or concept is really coming through... it's not about my attachment to this specific school. I use this school's campus as an analogy to my early life. It brings me nostalgia because of sentiments it recalls from my early life. My taking time alone at this place is meant to show an attachment to my early life, not the school itself.

Did this come through for anyone else, or was it poorly written enought that this idea was not communicated well?

You did an acceptable job with this PS, but I had a few things you might want to ruminate on a little bit.

1. You try to use this full circle approach to your view of life on a farm, but I don't really see the connection between you hating it when you were younger but have come to appreciate it now. Nowhere in your intro about the farm do you talk about long hours spent thinking and developing your intellectual curiousity, and yet you purport in your final paragraph that you picked it up on the farm. Don't try to make up false ties to your past just to make yourself sound good. I don't know about others, but that's how it came off to me when I saw that apparent disconnect.

2. You speak to the research project you did in college pretty well explaining how you approached the topic, but it wasn't particularly stimulating and I'm not entirely sure I learned anything new about you with it. Maybe it's just me, but I didn't feel any sense of, "wow, that's a really interesting topic and they make it sound like it involved a lot of work and creative thought." Anytime you're going to describe a project you worked on, it needs to either highlight your tireless work ethic or highlight how you approached a difficult problem and overcame it. Just telling me how you did a senior thesis isn't really that interesting about you: a lot of people do theses in their senior year.

3. One thing that stood out to me is the discussion of not being given the time to pursue extracurricular activities while working on the farm, and yet you do nothing to discuss it in the later part when you're at college. If it had that big of an impact on you growing up, I would've expected you to come full circle and dive right into some extracurricular when you got to a place where extracurriculars are almost expected of you. This made me question why you mention no time for extracurriculars at all. If you were simply trying to describe how much work was on a small farm, you can do so in much clearer ways without raising questoins in the readers mind.

4. Personally I didn't like the discussion of you sitting on a park bench to bring some sort of theme to your PS. It comes off to me as an almost Forrest Gump-like connection, and it just wasn't really my flavor. There is nothing wrong with it I guess, but I just didn't like it.

That's all I have for now, but good luck with editing and I hope it all turns out!

Agreed with matthewsean (as almost always). Your PS is a bit too ethereal for my taste, but I think that it can work if you do some editing for tone and flow. A few things that really stood out to me in not such a great way:

-The more-than-full-time way of life
-an indispensable precursor to my more recent life AND acted as an indispensable precursor of my more recent life (you use the same verbiage twice)
-The last two sentences make you sound like a recluse. Not exactly someone I'd be hoping to bring into my law school
-I had found an academic niche (what is it?)

good luck!

bump because I posted a new draft.

Bump. I'm looking for some feedack on the new draft. Anything appreciated.

You managed to cut out most of the problems I had with your earlier draft, so good job with that. In reading your revised statement, I found a structural problem that sort of nagged at me. I think you might be overusing punctuation. This causes the statement to feel disjointed for the reader. Sentences like the following show this pretty well, and it happens throughout.

With me I carry, as always, an aged sketchbook messily packed with loose sheets. At the crest, I’ll sit for a few isolated hours, staring down at the pale green trim highlighting the rigid dimension of the farmhouse, reviewing my thoughts, and sketching drawings and ideas into my disheveled notebook.

See what I mean? It probably makes perfect sense in your mind as the writer, but I'm not in your mind, so I have to figure out my own way to read this. You never want a reader to have to go back and reread a sentence to make sure he or she understands what you're saying. It makes the statement awkward and clunky which makes the statement far less effective.

Your statement is getting stronger, but that structural problem needs to be resolved.

^^exactly. I also like the approach to your opening paragraph significantly better, but I think the tenses used were confusing. You say "my young self kicks...I hike...I'll sit"

Reading it out loud might help.

You should have an honest friend who is a good writer edit this line by line. Your writing needs to be much more clear. There are a lot of phrases in this that are just incorrect or not clear. Like "deeply imprinted with prints," "makes the path appear as a set of railroad track," "exclusive and diminishing American lifestyle" (you didn't have a "diminishing lifestyle," the number of people with your lifestyle was diminishing. See the difference?), "many desired extracurricular activites" (desirable? be more clear. did you want to do ballet or something and your family couldn't afford it and you didn't have the time? just say that), "aiding as a hand" (working as a hand? helping out on the farm?), etc. It is obvious that you are trying to write really formally and it's hurting you a lot.

Great advice everyone. Thanks. I'll take this all into account and post another draft soon.

bump for the new draft

I'm not sure this needs to be "fixed," but I still sense an underlying disdain for the life you lived growing up. It's not a horrible thing, but it makes me empathize more with your parents than with you. I can't help but think, "your parents were doing what they thought was best. Who are you to judge it?" I know you learned from it and came to appreciate it in an abstract way, but I still get the sense that you look down on your parents for making that decision and think yourself better than them for it. It might be off base, but that's how I read it. Is there any way you can avoid this negative attitude toward your upbringing?