Essay Writing 101: Write Practice Essays To Properly Prepare for and Ultimately Pass Your Jurisdiction's Bar Examination.

One of the main difficulties I have with clients who are sitting for the bar exam is the very simple notion that the applicant must practice writing essays from actual bar exam questions. Practice writing does not initially make the perfect writer, however, practice writing does make the writer a better and more aware exam taker. You are not, by the way, shooting for perfection, you are seeking as best an understanding as possible of the makeup of a bar exam question ... while striving to write a more perfect answer. Practice writing makes the applicant aware of her mistakes, aware of how much or how little law she knows, and after writing the answer, she is aware of the subtleties of the bar examiners' testing protocal.

Practice writing is not you preparing an outline of an answer in ten (10) minutes, with the hurried threat of your mind begging you to turn to the end of a book or website to "find" the answer. Practice writing means going the distance of the question for a jurisdiction --> writing out a 30, 45, or 60 minute question. Practice writing means that the applicant has pen (or, computer) in hand, timer in place, earplugs in ears (or, not), and hearing your heart mumble something to your chest in the middle of some library room while it is 90 degrees of sun outside.

The argument I often hear against writing essays as soon as possible into the bar exam process is that the person does not know enough law to adequately answer the question. My answer to that statement is three-fold: (1) you know more law than you think; (2) you may never know all of the law necessary to answer all of any question, and (3) you must learn to struggle with facts that you do not readily know the answer to in any fact pattern that is thrust upon you.

(1) You do not know how much law you know until you are faced with writing an answer.

(2) "When Will I Know," enough law to answer all of the questions. Do you want to really wait that long?

(3) I would like to focus on the third point because somehow fear creeps up and crawls inside of the applicant when he or she is faced with a question in which the answer is not known.

When you test yourself often, you are bound to come across facts that are unfamiliar to you. You are also more than likely to come across a word or term that is not a part of your vocabularly, or, even a phrase from a subject in which you are unfamiliar. You cannot run from these words, and the words are definitely not going to run from you. So what must you do.

Look at the facts, critically. What story do the facts reveal to you? You must make sense of the story before you because there must be some structure to the question and you will have to provide a structure to your answer that looks, tastes, smells, and reads like an attorney wrote it. You cannot just stare at the page. This is why you practice writing essay questions. Now!

So, you want to be used to opening up the book to a question on a subject you have reviewed so that you can get down with that question. If you do not start to get down with questions to prepare yourself to write answers now, the bar examiners will have a wonderfully packaged present for you sometime in November of this year. It will be an envelope, specially addressed to you, inviting you to another important event in Februay 2011.

This is not the circumstance where you want to hear the phrase, "May I have the envelope, please?"

Tomorrow: The Beginning - How To Approach & Dissect An Essay Question - What To Look For - What To Do.