Good Writing

My colleague Alison, who heads up our college admissions pratice, just wrote this great blog posting about overcoming writer's block when trying to write your personal essay. It's targeted at college applicants, but it's such great advice that I wanted to share it with other applicants as well (law school, business school, etc.), so I'm "advertising" her post here for our wider readership. Check out her posting and share any tips you have for conquering writer's block!

There are several reasons why this BBC article is very, very funny. Among them:

For those of us old enough to have used Walkmen (Walkmans?), it's hilarious to read about someone from the iPod generation experimenting with his dad's antediluvian portable music device. ("It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape." "I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.")

And while I can't speak for this particular writer -- I can't accuse the writer or the BBC of anything -- I suspect that the person who wrote these words is not, in fact, 13 years old. ("Genre-specific"? Please.) Examples that set off my Dad-Wrote-This detector:

• "So it's not exactly the most aesthetically pleasing choice of music player."
• "From a practical point of view, the Walkman is rather cumbersome, and it is certainly not pocket-sized, unless you have large pockets."
• "But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down 'rewind' and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured."
• "Perhaps that kind of anticipation and excitement has been somewhat lost in the flood of new products which now hit our shelves on a regular basis."
• "Not long after the music warbled into life, it abruptly ended."
• "Did my dad, Alan, really ever think this was a credible piece of technology?"
• "But given the dreadful battery life, I guess this was an outright necessity rather than an extra function."

I don't have any trouble believing that these observations came from someone so young that he can't fathom a device that doesn't shuffle your music for you. But I do suspect strongly that dad had a hand here in a ghostwriting capacity. The examples I quoted above are not the vernacular that typically emerges from the mouths of 13-year-old boys, even in the U.K. (Americans seem to think that all kids over there sound like Harry Potter. They do not.)

Why do I dwell on this? It's a hilarious article, I'm glad they wrote it, and it made me laugh. Hats off to them. However... it reminds me to remind you (especially the parents out there) that when you meddle too much with your child's writing in the application process, admissions officers can smell that A MILE AWAY. They want to receive applications from your kids, not from you.

I have had a number of conversations with parents that go something like this:

Anna: Very nice essay.

Dad: Yes, we (!) really like it.

Anna: I'm hearing more [dad] in here than [daughter].

Dad: [Protracted silence.] Wow, you can tell?

Anna: Yep. Did you write the whole thing?

Dad: Well... uh. It's really her ideas.

Anna: She needs to write it, too.

Dad: So you're telling us to scrap this and start over?

Anna: Yes.

Many parents tell me that they are "best friends" with their kids, and they seem to think that means they have picked up the vernacular so well that they can mimic their children in their written work. But people who read essays from teenagers every day can tell the difference between the voice of a forty-something (or older) and the voice of a teenager.

So my advice, as always, is to keep a proper distance from your kids' writing. It's OK for you to help them generate and evaluate good essay ideas and topics, teach them how to improve their grammar and their spelling and their punctuation, encourage them to edit and edit and edit again, teach them how to proofread, and help them as they make editorial decisions about what to cut and what to keep.

Ghostwriting, though, is not OK, and parent-written essays uniformly end up being worse than the real thing. They are too safe, they are too boring, they sound phony, and they don't capture, in any way, the quirky and very fleeting way that teenagers observe their world or describe it. That quirkiness should be embraced, not stamped out.

And that's true for admissions consultants as well: your/our job is to draw out the best material and writing from applicants, in their own words and in their own voices. More than that crosses a line.

In light of Anna's recent blog entry about good writing (here), I thought I'd chime in and add a little tidbit about good writing as well.

Professor Sherman, a Harvard Law grad and phenomenal teacher, once solemly whispered to me, "You must be willing to kill your babies."

This was in reference to good writing. =)

Over the years, we (the Anna Ivey Team) have helped countless aspiring law students with their personal statements. And I'm shameless at admitting that we're pretty darn effective at drawing out the best writing from their creative minds. It also reminded me of an important piece of advice as people go through the process of applying.

I remember sitting down to read an applicant's personal statement once, only to call her three minutes later and tell her to kill her babies (get rid of some paragraphs). Her writing wasn't bad. However, it wasn't excellent, either.  Like many, many applicants, she had written a personal statement that sounded more like high-minded hosh-posh, proclaiming the meaning of justice and the virtues of law. She had forgotten one thing: her audience. Law school admissions officers, law professors, and even law students probably know more about the subject matter than she could have mustered convincingly on a 2-3 page statement. Knowing your audience is an important element of good writing.

Unless you have geniunely substantive things to say about law or legal practice (e.g. your experience interviewing clients during your internship with the public defender's office), it's generally a good idea to choose a topic you know something about.

Writing a winning personal statement certainly takes time. It also takes flexibility and good judgment to know when to "kill your babies." 

In my role as a law school career advisor, I spend a lot of time discussing job applications with students and assessing resumes and cover letters. Below I list my top five tips for resumes and for cover letters. Later this week I will follow up with tips for interviews and internships. Do you agree with my advice? Do you have other suggestions or are there critical tips I neglected to provide? Please post your tips, too!

Top Five Resume Tips

1. Use action verbs to highlight the transferable skills you have developed. All law schools and legal employers appreciate applicants who can explain how they did the following: edited, drafted, managed, organized, researched, led, persuaded, counseled, taught, assessed, and tutored.

2. Provide detailed content-the key to an effective resume. For example, if you worked as a paralegal, "Conducted legal research, edited briefs, and organized case files" is much more powerful than "Assisted attorneys with case management." In fact, don't use "Assist"-that word is very vague, and can mean anything from "helped attorney write memoranda" to "got coffee for partners."

3. Highlight volunteer activities. These are just as-or more!-meaningful as paid jobs at this stage in many applicants' and students' lives.

4. Value quality over quantity. If possible, demonstrate a long-term commitment to a limited number of meaningful activities (regular volunteer work, leadership roles, increasing responsibility) instead of providing a list of memberships that require no active involvement.

5. Proofread, edit, proofread, edit! Print out your resume for a hard-copy edit, and make sure that at least one other person proofreads it as well.

Top Five Cover Letter Tips

Your cover letter is the first writing sample an employer will see, so thoughtful writing and careful editing are critical. 

1. Explain why you want this job. Do not use a generic letter for which you cut-and-paste the employer's name.

2. Carefully read the employers' job description and website so you can address specifically why you are a strong candidate for the position.

3. Do not repeat your resume by listing all of your prior experiences in paragraph form. Instead, highlight a few experiences and explain how they are relevant to this job application. Provide specific examples to back up your claims of certain skills.

4. Convey confidence but not arrogance.

5. Address the letter to a specific individual if at all possible, rather than "To Whom It May Concern."

See more on cover letters here. 

 

Nicole Vikan is a graduate of NYU Law School. She spent her first law school summer at a large law firm, and her second summer in the Homicide Investigation Unit at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. She returned to the District Attorney's Office after graduation and spent five years as a criminal prosecutor, handling cases such as robbery and assault. Nicole then joined Fordham Law School's Career Planning Center, where she advised students seeking employment in the private and public sectors. She is currently a career counselor at Georgetown Law Center's Office of Public Interest and Community Service. As part of the Anna Ivey team, Nicole works with law school applicants and people exploring legal careers.

Every day in my work with applicants, I hear from people who tell me, "Oh, I'm a great writer! You don't have to worry about that part of things." And immediately I know we have a long road ahead of us, because what they usually put in front of me reads like a long stream of tweets.

I find it criminal that many college students who have worked hard and moved mountains to attend good schools have no idea what good writing is. And you shouldn't even have to attend a top school to learn the basics of good writing.

It's not your fault. You are not stupid. But you have been allowed to get away with sloppy work. You have been poorly served, and I'd like to take a crack at explaining why that matters.

The best thing that ever happened to me, truly, was when I got a paper back from one of my teachers at the University of Cambridge with the word "facile" scrawled across the bottom.

You should be so lucky. The days of getting back a paper covered in red ink -- correcting all your bad punctuation, fixing your verb tenses, changing "which" to "that," and explaining the fourteen different ways in which your syntax and grammar and argument are flawed -- seem, from my viewpoint, to be over. 

I'm amazed when I look at students' undergraduate writing samples -- ones they want to submit to graduate school admissions committees, particularly for PhD programs -- and the graded copies don't have a single correction in them. I'm not exaggerating; that's been true for most of the papers I've seen.

Even worse, those educators who hand back unmarked papers haven't just failed to teach you how to write; they have also lied to you. Whether indirectly through unmarked papers and easy As, or directly to your face, they have led you to believe that you're great writers. And that particular fiction sets you up for a lot of disappointment when you've left behind the world of lazy As and have to write something that actually counts and will be read with a critical eye.

It's not your fault that some of these teachers have neglected to teach you how to write, but it's also now your responsibility to learn. (Professors themselves are often terrible writers, so perhaps you're actually better off if they haven't tried to teach you how to write. At least you can start with a clean slate.)

Your whole ability to think critically is at stake. In Politics and the English Language -- which anyone who wants to write anything of consequence should read before graduating from college -- Orwell reminds us that sloppy thoughts lead to sloppy writing, and that sloppy writing leads to sloppy thoughts. So bad writing actually makes us stupider: the language "becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." The good news? "[T]he process is reversible."

So before you start writing, think about what it is you want to communicate -- not just with this word or that sentence, but also in this paragraph, and the next one, and in this essay as a whole. You'll have to turn off the tweeting part of your brain and ask yourself how every single word, sentence, and paragraph ties together. Because admissions officers, BigLaw partners, managing directors, and all sorts of people who hold your fate in their hands will be absolutely merciless about your writing.

Good writing does NOT have to be about blind adherence to conventions. Learn the rules, and then break them to great rhetorical effect. Here's a slice from my ever-morphing reading list for good writing (some are how-to books, others are examples of good expository writing, because you'll also have to read to become good writers). 

• Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose by Constance Hale
• E.B. White's The Ring of Time (I'm not crazy about his Elements of Style, however -- there are some weird and clunky examples in that one.)
• The Best American Essays 2007, edited by David Foster Wallace
• The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Joyce Carol Oates
• What is an Academic Paper, from the Dartmouth Writing Series
• Introduction from Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities
• Gilles v. Blanchard, Judge Richard A. Posner, US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit

I'll likely add more as I think of them, but please contribute your own in the comments!

Edited to add: On reflection, and after receiving some pointed feedback, I have edited some of my less nuanced statements to make clear that I do not think all teachers neglect their duties to teach good writing, and that I do not think they are all lazy. Throwing around such categorical descriptions is itself, of course, a form of bad writing, so I've made a few changes.

Recently I got an earful (or, more accurately, an inbox full) from some employers about the fine art of cover letters - mostly about what not to do. I'll paste in a sample below.

This is a good opportunity to remind my twenty-something crowd that there are often generational dynamics at work when you submit cover letters, to Gen Xers in particular. Overwhelmingly, my Gen X contacts recoil from what they perceive as extreme self-congratulation in Gen Y cover letters -- something to keep in mind when you're writing for a particular audience. Things that might fly with your own age group, or your boomer parents, or admissions officers don't necessarily go over well with everybody.

The other common theme is that long cover letters go straight into the trash, so keep your cover letters short and sweet.

Reactions? Advice? Anecdotes? Please share!

• So I am trying to staff my new office and am reviewing a few hundred resumes. Painful on many levels. Who the *hell* taught people to write cover letters that include phrases like "My analytic ability is keen" or "my written and oral skills are exceptional" or "I am confident you will find my communication skills outstanding" or, my favorite, "I am tomorrow's strategic executive."???? Literally every other letter includes this crap. Anna, save these people.
• I've been doing interviews for internship positions for the past few weeks. I've noticed how little I pay attention to the cover letters (I skim...I'm talking 30 seconds, tops). If the cover letter takes up the entire page, I almost never read it (I just look at the length and say, "too long").
• I've now read or skimmed a few hundred cover letters in the last 48 hrs and have learned nothing positive from a single one. Cleverness comes off as defensiveness and confidence as boastfulness. I don't even think the negative impressions I'm left with are necessarily deserved, and I've decided to give some interviews in spite of the letters. People need to shut up.
• They need to use extremely conventional resume formatting because I refuse to look at "Skill Profile" sections and resumes divided into quadrants and school listings that fail to show me grad dates. I shudder to think that the cover letters for my own 20 year old internship applications could even conceivably still exist somewhere. I committed all these sins in spades.
• I think cover letters should be extremely straightforward, repeat little that is in the resume, and never try to be boastful or cute. I know this is tougher for recent college grads - they presumably need to show why they want a particular job. But then just say that. Shut up about supposed attributes. If they want to be clever (and they shouldn't) then save it for the resume in the extracurriculars.
• I can think of a lot of scenarios when a cover letter is essential -- esp. when you are explaining a non-traditional path or a not-obvious transition. I just haven't seen many done well.
• First rule of cover letters is: do no harm. They can help, but rarely do, and the assumption in some professions is that the decision makers never see/look at the cover letter anyway, just the resume. So the goal is to write something that doesn't end up in your file with a highlighted part and a note that says "what a dolt!"
• I got 180 applications for the last position I had - for a job that includes lots of writing and even more editing. More than half the apps got thrown out based on the cover letter alone. Not just bad writing, but misspellings, grammar problems, proofreading errors, and one reference to "The Lord led me to you [sic] job decsripton [sic]." You've got to wonder what they thought they were going to accomplish.

I had the honor of guest-blogging for one of my favorite blogs, Blueprint for Financial Prosperity. Check out my 8 job tips for new graduates here.

It's peak admissions season and I'm a bad, bad blogger as a result -- lots of client work to turn around (bless them!). But... in the meantime, I have to share the weirdest, juiciest story I've read in a long time. The opening paragraph:This is the story in which you learn how a graduate of Columbia Law School—that’s me—and almost 80 other people, who really should have known better, got suckered into giving away all our personal details as well as up to two months of our lives for “jobs” that never actually existed. And then you learn why it all happened the way it did.Read on here.

True story? Fiction? Who cares? I want more.

This time of year I field lots of questions about the secret to success in law school. I don't know that there's a magic secret out there, but I do like these tips from Vikram Amar, professor at UC Hastings:

• on taking law school exams (don't wait until exam week to read these)

• on success in law school and beyond

(I have to love a man who throws around words like "equipoise." Beautiful.)

If all of the above gives you the illusion of control over your law school grades, there's always this.

There I days I don't miss being an admissions officer. Last week I attended an MBA admissions panel. I used to do those roadshows, where five admissions officers sit on a stage talking to an audience of hundreds about the admissions process in vague generalities and answer audience questions with vague generalities. Admissions officers are very limited in the candor they can express in public, but there were some nuggets that were dead on, so I'll condense them here and paraphrase a little bit:

1. If your college grades weren't so hot, be upfront about that and explain why. Show that you are in a better position now to do the work. How do you prove that? By taking classes and guiding your recommenders to cite examples from your job that could allay fears about your ability to hack it in a competitive academic environment. Admissions officers care about your undergraduate performance not because they want to obsess needlessly over who you were five or eight or ten years ago, but because they don't want to set you up for failure. They'll also scrutinize your transcript for evidence of both quantitative and verbal skills, so if your background appears to be lacking in one or the other, go make up that deficit either in the classroom or on the job or on your GMAT.

2. Recommendations from people who've seen your day-to-day performance on the job are the best predictor of future performance. Ideally they'll talk about what kind of impact you've had on the organization and on the people with whom you work. Admissions officers know that you likely have not been managing other people yet at this stage in your careers, so you need to think about what impact you've had, and how you achieved those results without direct authority over people (meaning, you managed from the side and managed from below).

Guiding your recommenders is fine: take them out for coffee (the best five bucks you'll spend) and give them examples that you think highlight and demonstrate that impact. Admissions officers insist that you can't and shouldn't write those recommendations yourself, but honestly, they are delusional if they think that even a majority of the recommendations they receive were written by the recommenders rather than the applicants. If admissions officers enforced the rule, they'd have to cut their applicant pool in half. The fact is, most recommenders will not take the time to write the letters themselves and delegate that task to the applicants to varying degrees. Still, it's in your best interest to find recommenders who are willing to write the letters themselves. Those letters are almost always stronger, in my experience, than when you try to speak for your recommenders.

3. Admissions officers are not impressed by long lists of activities. They'd rather you whittle that list down to the activities that really matter to you. Schools are building communities, and they seek people who are engaged with the world around them. They want to see demonstrated, continued involvement, so banging some nails for Habitat once a year isn't going to cut it. Activities are also often a great way to demonstrate your leadership experiences and lessons in your essays.

There were a few statements that made me scribble furiously in disagreement:

1. "Try not to worry about your essays." Huh? That makes no sense. The essays are the most labor-intensive part of the application. I would hope applicants worry about them, if that means taking them seriously and expending a lot of effort on them. It's insulting to require all those essays and then tell applicants not to worry about them.

2. In your essays, "be yourself." "Differentiate yourself." How is that helpful advice? It's not. At all.

3. "Embrace the opportunity to interview." "Be yourself in the interview." Except that some people really stink at interviews. Not everyone is good at interviewing. It's a learned and learnable skill, but it takes practice and plenty of feedback.

4. It's not enough that admissions officers from top business schools butcher English grammar; apparently they have to butcher Latin grammar as well. My ears bled a little bit when one of them referred to her school's "curriculi."

One other observation: I spotted a large number of women dressed inappropriately for a professional event. Simple rules to remember: no miniskirts, and no high-heeled slides (which, aside from looking unprofessional, also sound unprofessional: slap, slap, slap. Not good.)

A last note: this particular admissions event was co-hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Alumni Club of Boston and Kaplan. The venue was papered in slick Kaplan brochures and folders and fliers. Do not choose Kaplan just because of their huge advertising budgets. There are much better GMAT options out there.