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donaldduck13
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donaldduck13
Saturday, Nov 23, 2024

I'm just a fellow 0L, so take all this with a huge grain of salt, but happy to throw a little feedback your way! I'm not going to bring up any spelling or grammar errors - you seem aware of them and I'm sure they're just artifacts of the time constraint. I think the content of your essay's really solid. You pick a position and make an argument for it with both the content of the perspectives and your own perspective.

You use a lot of examples to strengthen your argument, which I think is a double-edged sword. Your personal experience with the attorney questioning the witness made what was a theoretical, philosophical argument (how can we prepare for the future?) into something more tangible. It tied well into your intro paragraph, where you discuss how your educational path worked out for you and a more career-focused one didn't work out for others. With your liberal arts education, you knew what that attorney didn't: that gravity pulls things downward (also, if that dude passed the bar, we're all gonna make it). Right after that, though, you gave more examples. To me, that sentence didn't add anything to the argument. We already know your background in econ shapes your view on the issue (first paragraph), and we just saw (through the lawyer) that you've seen this firsthand.

Overall, I think that your essay could and should be written more concisely. I'm guessing that you didn't have time to make any edits, because every part of the LSAT would be three times easier if only there wasn't a clock ticking down. Paragraph Four left me confused on first read. I think that a large part of that confusion came from the sheer bulk of your sentences. I like the example you chose to include, but I think that you're giving it a bit too much heavy lifting. Making the main component of your argument an example makes Paragraph Four read like Paragraph Three, which in turn blurs the distinction between the two lines of argument you make. You do a great job at integrating multiple perspectives and lines of evidence, but I feel that you don't get enough credit for that, because both your paragraphs follow a very similar structure. Additionally, I'm not sure what parts of Paragraph Four were part of the example and what parts weren't. The line "while a very good career..." could refer to the engineering job, or something else - you lost me around the third use of the word "career". I would recommending targeting a shorter length, even if that means making a less complete argument, and ensuring to leave time to make some preliminary edits for readability. Keep an eye out for sentences that don't provide any new information or strengthen the argument any further. You have a tendency to circle back to points you've already made. While that's a good technique in moderation, I think that you did it excessively here due to a desire to make sure you got your argument across under time pressure.

Example of what I mean about repeating information: your second sentence in Paragraph Five. By now, we've already covered the meaning of a liberal arts education (you define this fully in Paragraph Two), so you don't need to specify that a liberal arts education can allow students "to be able to do that". We also know that a career prep curriculum features career-centric coursework - you don't need to tell us that. I would rewrite this sentence as something along the lines of "A liberal arts college allows some students to focus on finding out who they are, while supporting others in more focused career preparation."

Last thing - keep an eye out for run-on sentences and incomplete sentences. As an example: I would split the last sentence of Paragraph Two around the word "preparing", to have one sentence introducing the potential harm and a second sentence explaining the rationale. In contrast, your second-to-last sentence starts with "Not only limiting their future career paths" - something is limiting someone's career paths. We know from context that you're referring to colleges taking the option of pursuing a liberal arts education away from students, but you don't actually put that subject into your sentence.

Apologies if any of this comes across as harsh or pretentious, and I genuinely hope this helps! Best of luck with the LSAT and your cycle. See you in court!

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