Writing Sample for Application to Join Law Review Forum

[studebaker07]

I am transferring to a new school and the school allows transfer students to petition for journal membership by submitting a "why I want to join" statement along with a writing sample.

The trouble is, I cannot find ANYTHING that meets the 10-page word limit that is imposed on writing sample submissions. (The memo I would like to send is 12 pages long including footnotes).

Is it permissible in these kinds of situations to just send in a memo and cut it short at 10-pages even though the conclusion might be missing? I am really at my wits end. I don't know what else there is to do besides taking a hatchet to the memo I wanted to send and cutting important substance from it.

[ArchRoark]

stop at 10 pages and put

"To be continued..."

Honestly, I have no clue.

[12262010]

you can't just edit it down so it's 10 pages and not missing critical elements?

[studebaker07]

I guess I could try to edit it down to 10 pages but I worry if I do that I could cut out too much substance. One option I could do is try and get there by going from double spaced lines to lines spaced at 1.5 or something. There are no instructions on how the writing sample should be formatted.

If I just played with the spacing of the document, do you think that would count against me because of some kind of general formatting rules that require double spaced lines?

[foucault3]

I am transferring to a new school and the school allows transfer students to petition for journal membership by submitting a "why I want to join" statement along with a writing sample.

The trouble is, I cannot find ANYTHING that meets the 10-page word limit that is imposed on writing sample submissions. (The memo I would like to send is 12 pages long including footnotes).

Is it permissible in these kinds of situations to just send in a memo and cut it short at 10-pages even though the conclusion might be missing? I am really at my wits end. I don't know what else there is to do besides taking a hatchet to the memo I wanted to send and cutting important substance from it.

The school I'm transferring out of had a similar page-limit for our law review write-on (they asked us to submit an 8 page writing sample). I took a brief I wrote during my first year, selected the section I felt was strongest (came to about 6 or so pages). Then, I prefaced that section with a 1-page introduction explaining that the section was excerpted from a larger brief, and explaining the facts of the case, etc.

[iheartlaw]

[quote="foucault3] The school I'm transferring out of had a similar page-limit for our law review write-on (they asked us to submit an 8 page writing sample). I took a brief I wrote during my first year, selected the section I felt was strongest (came to about 6 or so pages). Then, I prefaced that section with a 1-page introduction explaining that the section was excerpted from a larger brief, and explaining the facts of the case, etc.[/quote]

TITCR. Write a brief introduction, that quickly highlights your best facts. If you have 2 issues you wrote on, you might want to consider scrapping one issue, and simply stating that this apart of a larger brief, but for purposes of this writing sample only issue 1 was included. This is the advice my appellate advocacy instructor gave me.

[studebaker07]

[

That's exactly what I did. I changed the facts up a little bit, did some cutting of my discussion section, and got it down to 9 pages.

Boom!