1st draft: Critique mine and I'll critique yours
Posted: Thu Dec 19, 2013 12:57 am
~Deleted~
I cut and pasted this into a word document and changed the formatting to 12 pt Times New Roman with regular double spacing. You're sitting at 4.6 pages now. I stopped reading after the first two or three sentences.
There's hope because you're self-aware. You know this is mostly garbage in its current form; you know it's wordy and you know it's full of meaningless horse doo-doo. That happens in first drafts and sometimes in final drafts. My advice to you is to read this and figure out if there's anything in here that gives you a feeling or helps you recall a feeling that was, and preferably still is, significant to you. I did scan it after going through the painstaking process of reading the first few sentences and got a sense you're trying to talk about some personal development that occurred. Build around that; take out the rest.
Structurally, try this: problem-->solution process (what you did)-->outcome (including the impact you had, the impact of the situation on you, and how it has informed your decision to become a lawyer).
When it comes to writing style, try reading what you've written aloud. If you comprehend what you've written, distill into shorter sentences and don't use so many $80 words. If you don't comprehend something or its significance, think about cutting it.
You have a good vocabulary and you will write something good. But you need to cut this by at least 20% before anyone will give you a really constructive critique.