Two to Scorn for the Price of One

First up in the "individuals deserving of my scorn" today is Ann Levine. If you recall, I've previously called Ann out for making up bogus and contradictory reasons to attend law school and for not reading or understanding what she cites to in order to support her commentary. So imagine my surprise when I ran across this article today where she does almost the exact same thing.

It's a well-intentioned piece about teaching students how to write a good personal statement. But what jumped out at me was this paragraph:

Q: I should start with something really dramatic.

A: Please don't. Lawyers don't write that way. You should worry less about shocking the reader and more about quickly piquing the reader's interest. Berkeley Law just posted a great example of what admissions committee members really think when you start your personal statement with a melodramatic tale. This is a must-read no matter where you are applying. Rather than trying to seek an emotional reaction, begin your personal statement with something honest and insightful.

If you actually read the article she links to, it says this:

It is very clear that many applicants have been coached by someone that this is how to write a compelling personal statement...This format is transparently manipulative, formulaic, and coached. Except for the occasional novelist we admit, none of our students or graduates is going to write in this style again; none, thank goodness, is going to begin a brief with, “He stood frozen in fear as the gunman appeared out of the darkness.” So, this artifice is irrelevant to law and counter-productive: Once it ceases to surprise – and it did so more than 10 years ago – it just becomes a cliché which really ought to be held against the writer. Not only using clichés, but also having been coached ought to, in an ideal world, discount an application. . . . [I]t is transparent when essay formulas have been coached, and we (should) strongly advise applicants to write in their own voice and style and without trying to dramatize what they have to say in order to attract our attention." (emphasis removed from original and added back where I see fit).

I have multiple problems with these excerpts. First, it would greatly help everyone if we were all honest and just admitted up front that personal statements are like exhibition games. You do it, but it doesn't really matter, and in the end it's your LSAT and GPA that get you places. A great personal statement really isn't going to save your 151 LSAT score unless you put it in an envelope with three-years tuition in advance.

Second, one of my pet peeves in writing is when people don't use consistent terminology. It's critical in legal writing to keep precise terms and know exactly what you're talking about. Here, the original piece is criticizing "cliched," "formulaic," "transparently manipulative" writing. By the time it got to Ann Levine's desk, it was transformed into "dramatic" and "melodramatic" and she tells you to be "honest and insightful." The Berkeley article addresses style, trying to get people to write in their own voice. Ann's mangling of the terms made it a content-based directive; instead of not "dramatizing," students are advised to avoid "drama" altogether. Those aren't the same thing.

Third, I have a major problem with both articles confusing the quality of the writing with the form the writing appears in. The problem with the examples the Berkeley piece provides isn't that they're "novel"-like or that they're dramatic, but that they're just flat-out lousy writing. Not all dramatic writing is bad, even in a legal context. A brief on the right subject matter can be both very effective and dramatic. But they're examples of good writing first. Take this opening of the summary from Paul Smith's Lawrence v. Texas brief:

As the experience of Lawrence and Garner vividly illustrates, Section 21.06 puts the State of Texas inside its citizens' homes, policing the details of their most intimate and private physical behavior and dictating with whom they may share a profound part of adulthood.

Don't you think that's trying to get an "emotional reaction?" That's more dramatic than it has to be, but it's effective, unlike the crappy writing styles that most nearly-illiterate law school applicants believe to be "good." You obviously can't do that with, say, arcane ERISA interpretations or in traffic court, but knowing how to phrase dramatic happenings within good, non-melodramatic writing is a very helpful skill in many areas of law. And being dramatic is the bread and butter of many trial attorneys.

But the biggest problem is what I've bolded above. In looking at said paragraph, it's impossible not to get the message that they hate when it's transparent that students are "coached." There is no way around the fact that Ann Levine is a law school "coach." The end message should be that they want to hear students' own voices and not something that has had the life sucked out of it by someone telling them what to write and how to write it, kind of like what Ann Levine does.

It's blatantly against her niche profession and yet she links to it as if she's above being a "coach," or perhaps maybe she just thinks her readers are dumb, or perhaps maybe she didn't comprehend the point. I don't think either is a great advertisement for her services.

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Second on my scorn list is this 38-year old doofus from the Charleston School of Law who put up 1,550 hours of "public service" at the local solicitor general's office and is now taking praise for it.

Kaufman, who earned a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, worked as an on-air radio personality for 14 years before deciding to enroll in law school.

It was in that career where he got his first experience with public service work, he said. His station sponsored an on-air campaign that quickly brought in $50,000 for a young woman who needed a liver transplant. "It was the most rewarding thing I've ever done," he said.

If he had done 1,550 hour of "public service" by actually helping people who need liver transplants, I would be all for it, and I would join the chorus of praise. But 1,550 hours for free at the local courthouse? That's 3/4 a work year they could have paid any number of people who are unemployed. Why, exactly, am I supposed to be happy about this?

I stand by my view that doing extensive pro bono work demeans the profession as a whole. Legal work is a valuable service