How to Perfect Your Oxford Written Work for the MJur, BCL, or MLF Application

If you’re applying for the Magister Juris (MJur), Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) or Master of Science in Law and Finance (MLF) programs at the University of Oxford, you’ll need to submit a written work. This is an essay of up to 2,000 words on a legal topic. I’ve written about similar essays before, and much of that advice is transferable to Oxford applications as well. In this blog post, I’ll focus on the most common mistakes people make in their Oxford written work.

Oxford Written Work: The Parameters of Assessment

According to Oxford’s website, the parameters of assessment include:

• A comprehensive understanding of the subject area,
• An understanding of problems within the area,
• An ability to construct and defend an argument,
• Your analytical and expressive skills.

In other words, you are tested on your analysis, reasoning, and writing skills.

Notably, you are not assessed on style. Institutions like Oxford and Harvard attract applicants from all over the world, each applicant having been exposed to a unique writing style in their national legal culture. Requiring them to adhere to, e.g., the British or American style of writing would be unfair, as it would favor applicants with that specific background while placing overseas applicants at a significant disadvantage. Adhering to a particular essay style is therefore not a stated parameter of assessment.

The key to a successful Oxford written work is addressing the prompt effectively.

As stated on the website, an academic piece is preferred, but if it's not available, you can submit a work written in a professional context. You will not be disadvantaged. As mentioned, you are evaluated on your analysis and writing skills, not the style of writing or the context in which your work was produced.

Many applicants submit an excerpt from a larger piece, such as a dissertation. Others write a fresh essay based on their professional experience. Both approaches are valid and can yield successful results.

Oxford Written Work: FAQ

Does the topic of Oxford written work have to align with my overall profile?

‍As I discuss in depth here, choosing a topic that echoes other parts of your application, such as your personal statement and your CV, can be beneficial as it’d create an overall coherence in your profile.

However, it’s not required. Otherwise, it’d be in the official requirements, but the latter are quite broad. All they ask you to do is submit an academic or professional work on a legal topic under 2,000 words. The work is not used to assess your motivation or commitment to the study of a particular subject. It’s used to evaluate your analytical, writing, and reasoning skills, and you can showcase that using any topic.

Can I use AI or will I be penalized for it?

‍Although different institutions employ different policies when it comes to the use of AI, most of them generally allow it. The question is how you use it. Under Oxford’s guidelines:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools may be used to research materials in preparing your application, but may not be used to generate documents or form the basis of documents that are then adapted. Our academic assessors will be looking for your own insights and critical evaluation skills, so it is unlikely that using AI tools to create your supporting documents will improve your chances of success. If academic assessors consider that inappropriate use of AI was made in application documents, they may reject your application.

As you can see, what can be detrimental to your application is not just any use of AI; it’s inappropriate use of AI.

The bottom line is, you can use it, but be careful, as AI shouldn’t substitute your own work. Remember, the goal of submitting Oxford written work is to showcase your analytical and writing skills, as they help the admissions committee determine your ability to handle the rigorous academic curriculum and excel in the program.

I'll discuss the most common mistakes now and how to avoid them.

Mistake 1: Not spending enough time on the introduction to your Oxford written work

If you study the most effective examples of legal writing, you’ll notice that their authors always spend time setting up the argument. They don’t throw you into the argument right away. They always prepare you. They give you the background of the question, enough for you to understand if you are a trained lawyer but not an expert in the field. They also tell you how the paper is going to be structured. Always.

It’s not a coincidence that larger works like PhD theses and books contain whole chapters that serve exclusively to achieve the goal of introducing the work and respectively closing it. When I submitted the semi-final version of my PhD thesis, we had a meeting with my supervisor to discuss the final edits. He barely commented on the 200 pages of the body of the thesis (he was pretty happy with it) but spent a whole hour giving feedback on the introductory chapter.

The son of a Soviet physicist and Nobel laureate Pyotr Kapitsa, Sergey Kapitsa, a renowned physicist himself, published a book titled The Life of Science (in Russian), which exclusively consisted of introductions and prefaces to influential scientific books. He believed that everything important was contained there; you could read the introduction and skip the rest.

Effective writers understand that not all parts of a paper are created equal. The introduction matters infinitely more than everything else. If you lose your reader in the first paragraph, you lose your reader. Period. You won’t be given a second chance to redeem yourself.

This applies across all types of writing. In some types of writing, the consequences of a poor introduction are simply more immediate and tangible – for instance, in business, if the first sentence of your ad is not engaging, no one will click on it or buy your product. You may think that legal writing, especially something as removed from the commercial world as an application to Oxford, is exempt from it, but it’s not. You just don’t see the consequences. You may get a rejection but you rarely know why.

The average number of applications for MJur and BCL combined is around 1,070. This means that after the deadline closes, the adcom will be tasked with sifting through 1,070 applications in a matter of weeks. It won’t be the only or the most important thing on their plates. Rather, they’ll be doing it on top of their other commitments.

When they get to your essay, they’re likely to do the following: They'll read your intro, skim the middle, and skip to the conclusion. If it appears to be a strong piece of writing, they might go back to the beginning and read the essay more closely. What they won’t do, especially on the first read, is pay close attention to each and every one of your sentences.

This means that the quality of your introduction will be regarded as a proxy for the overall quality of your writing. If your introduction is not convincing, they won’t have a reason to engage with the rest.

In my experience, the vast majority of applicants do not recognize that. Very often, they plunge the reader right into the middle of a complex argument, expecting them to just follow. But the thing is, just because you wrote something, it doesn’t mean that other people owe you attention.

To maximize your chances for admission, invest time and effort into crafting a good introduction. It does not have to be long to be effective. Usually, a good introduction will include one or two paragraphs setting the stage for the essay, i.e., introducing the reader to the background of your topic, followed by a roadmap. The roadmap can be as short as:

This essay is structured as follows. First, it will address... Second, it will propose… Third, it will examine...

Oxford written work tests, among others, your skills of expression, and the ability to succinctly introduce your topic and clearly enunciate the flow of your argument in a structured manner is a key part of it.

The introduction is everything. Don’t underestimate it.

Similar logic applies to conclusions. If you want to come across as an effective writer, you can’t just drop your argument and leave. After you’ve said what you wanted to say, you need to close the piece. This is part of the expression skills as well.

Mistake 2: Not Structuring Your Oxford Written work Before Writing

When reviewing Oxford written work, I often notice that the author hasn’t planned or outlined the essay before writing it.

Even though being a lawyer essentially means being a writer, most lawyers don’t get trained in writing. They either develop the skills on their own, or they don’t. As a result, the way one usually approaches Oxford written work is that they read on their topic, and then they just try to write a coherent text from scratch.

What happens when you write like this, with no systematic process to support your efforts, is that you end up with an essay where ideas are either overpacked or missing, and it’s hard to discern the logical flow of your argument.

A solution to this affliction is outlining. Outlining essentially means making a plan for your essay. An outline is a skeleton of your argument, the sequence of its key ideas summarized in a few sentences. If you study the writing process of famous writers, you’ll notice that many of them plan and outline their writing. This is definitely something I advocate for, both for statements of purpose and essays on a legal issue such as Oxford written work or Harvard’s personal statement part ‘a.’ You can find an example of a short outline in this blog post on my Harvard essay.

Probably, you were not even exposed to the idea that you could ‘plan’ your writing. That’s okay. I only became familiar with the concept during my PhD, when I had to produce large volumes of high-quality original academic output and wanted to build a system I could leverage to make the process more efficient.

The process of doing an outline can create resistance. However, it really pays off. The thing is, when you do an outline, you spot early on all the places where your argument is inconsistent, where you assumed too much knowledge on the reader’s side and need to spend more time explaining your idea, where you missed links, or spent too much time on ideas irrelevant to your argument. An outline allows you to correct the flow of the argument before you invest in writing up the entire text, and your ‘ability to construct and defend an argument’ is one of the key assessment parameters for Oxford written work.

If you plan and outline your essay, writing the full text becomes significantly easier. All you need to do is expand the sentences in the outline into actual paragraphs.

You can still do the outline if you’ve already written the text (a reverse outline). There are multiple ways to do it, but the one I use most often is to create a new Word file and reconstruct the flow of the essay from scratch. I don’t try to recreate the wording. Rather, I write down the sequence of key ideas that the essay is about. It is very effective in spotting any flaws or missing links in the argument. It also helps to see if the structure is working – or if certain ideas need to be rearranged or replaced, whether there is unnecessary repetition, or if there are too many ideas crammed into a single piece of writing.

Regardless of where you are in your writing, doing an outline will help you improve it.

Mistake 3: Not Treating Paragraphs in your oxford written work As Contained Lines of Thought

I’ll explain.

There is no homogeneous skill of ‘writing.’ ‘Writing’ is an umbrella term for multiple skills. One of those skills is constructing good paragraphs. Each paragraph in your essay is a building block in your argument and needs to drive your argument forward.

What I often see when reviewing Oxford written work are either paragraphs that contain too many thoughts or paragraphs that are underdeveloped.

One paragraph is typically one contained line of thought, and you need to treat it accordingly. Effective paragraphs tend to follow this structure:

• A topic sentence introducing the main idea of the paragraph.
• Several sentences developing the idea.
• A concluding sentence summarizing the point and/or providing a transition to the next paragraph.

A good paragraph is almost like a mini-essay.

Usually, good writing is a combination of shorter and longer paragraphs. When you write your essay, look out for paragraphs that are either too short or too long. If all of your paragraphs are too short, they may need more development. Try to avoid one-sentence paragraphs unless they are justified. Justified one-sentence paragraphs are very rare in the academic context such as an application to Oxford, as ideas here tend to be more complex than in other types of writing. On the other hand, if all of your paragraphs are too long, they may need splitting up to improve readability.

Pay attention to topic sentences – they are important. They introduce your paragraph. Concluding sentences are also essential – don’t finish abruptly and leave the reader hanging. Close your thought before you move on to the next one.

The length in and of itself is not necessarily an indicator that the paragraph is not working, and you always need to look at the function of the paragraph in your text. I suggest going through your essay paragraph by paragraph and asking what its purpose is and how it’s developing your argument.

Mistake 4: Not Being Clear Enough in your oxford written work

When you are writing an essay on a legal topic, you’ve probably spent a lot of time immersing yourself in the topic. You’ve probably researched the heck out of it. And you probably know a lot about it. You definitely know a lot more than anyone on the admissions committee.

A tendency that I see is to assume too much knowledge on the side of the admissions committee. It’s sort of the ‘what is obvious to me, is obvious to you’ approach. In reality, in many things in life, including Oxford written work, the approach should be ‘what is obvious to me, is obvious to me.’

When you write your essay, make sure that you set your topic up for the reader. This can be done, for instance, in the introduction and through structure (most essays I’ve seen would have benefited from being split into subsections). Make sure you give sufficient information to the reader about the premise of your writing so that a non-expert could understand what you are writing about and why. You are assessed on your skills of expression, and this is a vital part of it.

You don’t need to over-explain. Your Oxford written work is not one of those American books that should really just be a tweet. However, keep in mind that you win absolutely nothing by being too clever, and you risk losing a lot. If your text has a threshold of entry that’s too high, your readers may just conclude that you are not good at communicating ideas, and it may cost you a chance of admission. Above all, optimize for clarity.

Mistake 5: underediting your oxford writen work

Most applicants dramatically underestimate the amount of editing they need to do to get to a highly functional, competitive draft. This has to do with the point I made above – that most people have never received any training in writing. They have not been exposed to the idea that writing is not chaos without shape or form, but rather a structured process with distinct stages.

Most applicants stop after producing a first draft that they may or may not tweak a bit. However, if you study successful writers, you’ll see that they edit obsessively. There is a cliché that writing is rewriting, and it's true. Most writing happens during editing. It's the editing that gets you from good to great.

In my Ultimate Guide to Writing Successful Personal Statements, I advise that the bare minimum of editing rounds you’ll need to get to a decent draft is five. It’ll depend on your language background, your English fluency, and your experience with writing, but five is the bare minimum. When working on my Harvard essays, I wrote 30 drafts to get to a point where I felt I was done. When writing my PhD at the EUI, I edited so much that the total volume of the work I discarded equaled the volume of the doctoral thesis.

I talk about it more in the course, but different rounds of editing should be dedicated to different goals. For instance, the first few rounds are usually focused on content. Before you make conclusive decisions about what to include, what to omit, what to spend more time on, etc., don’t move to the next stage.

After you’ve settled on the content, dedicate several rounds of editing to:

• refining the flow of ideas: Do ideas logically flow one into another, or are there gaps?
• paragraphing: Do your paragraphs represent contained lines of thought? Are your topic sentences effective? Do you find a way to close a thought before moving on to the next one?
• overall clarity: Did you take the time to set the topic up for the reader, or did you assume that everything that’s obvious to you is obvious to them?

All good writers put their writing through external copy-editing. After you’re done, ask someone to read your work. Preferably it’ll be a lawyer but a non-expert in your field – most of your readers will be non-experts, and it’ll approximate the evaluation process. Ask a colleague or a friend. If you don’t have anyone to ask, an effective technique is to read your text out loud. This helps to spot the issues more easily.

There is a lot you can do to improve your draft regardless of how much or how little resources you have. A major part of it comes down to editing and rewriting like your life depends on it, because in admissions, it does.

Final Thoughts

To summarize, in order to get your Oxford written work in the best shape possible, make sure to:

• Invest time and effort into setting up your argument, especially crafting your introduction and roadmap.
• Plan your work before you write it. Jot down the main idea of each paragraph and its function first, then expand it into paragraphs.
• Make sure each paragraph is a contained line of thought that has a beginning and an end and drives your argument forward.
• Check your assumptions. Make sure the premise of your writing is clear to a competent reader who is not an expert in your field of study.
• Edit, edit, edit.

If you'd like me to review your Oxford written work, please read about my process and fill out a short form.

Hope this helps and good luck! ☺️