文书写作指南大全（三）文章结构
With the new U.S. policy focus on trade with Latin America and with more and more businesses using labor abroad, labor conditions in maquiladoras will be a growing human rights issue. At the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), I have been able to write letters to the USTR pushing for the continued review of the Generalized System of Preferences in Guatemala, to the President of El Salvador to encourage the enforcement of their labor codes, and lobbied for a labor petitioning amendment to the Caribbean Basin Trade Security Act.
A law degree would give me a tool to continue to work effectively and realistically on this and other issues that contribute to the well-being of people affected by U.S. policies and investments in Latin America.
三、比较与对比法
与利用直接经验相反，有些申请者把他们自己的经验和对研究生所要求的技能进行比较。在这种情况下，他们可以选择 “比较与对比”结构。例3这位申请人用了这一结构，他集中论述一本书对他的学习方法的影响。这一结构还可通过变化之前的你与现在的你的对比来说明你生活中的一个变化。
例3： Influence of Book
注意：为了教学目的，该文发表时未加修改。
"How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book." (Thoreau) One evening, during Christmas vacation of my freshman year in college, when a formidable storm outside called for an evening of hot tea and heavy reading, I picked up a book that had been sitting on my desk for several weeks. On the cover, it read "Selections of the Essays: Montaigne." On the inside, only a few circled page numbers evidenced that the book had ever been used.
I was supposed to have read Montaigne that past quarter for Honors Humanities Core, but had, instead, done no more than to skim key pages highlighted in lecture-enough to earn myself a decent grade in the course. That was how I approached school then-with the goal of getting the highest possible grade with the least possible effort. Grades have always been, after all, very important to me. Having been unsure as to what I wanted to do in life, I figured that getting good grades would insure that once I decided on what I wanted, that that opportunity would still lie open for me. Such, then, was how I justified my attitude towards studying; it served the very practical goal of rendering myself "marketable."
This approach to academics is not original. My parents taught me that the only way I would get anywhere in life (in the States) was through education. United States immigrants, arriving in 1975 as refugees from Vietnam, our family was forced to leave all our belongings behind. We had to make a fresh start in a foreign country. My father's only asset was his mind-he had a college education. The first five years we were here, he worked at a sewage plant while studying on his own for the country's engineering exam. After passing the exam, he got a job as a civil engineer at the City of Anaheim. Six years later, he was promoted to a position above that of his own boss, then,-that of Water Engineering Manager. All along, what he taught my four siblings and I was that the best thing we could do for ourselves was to study hard. Education (along with hard work), he always said, serve as the key to succeeding and to earning people's respect in this country (which he did). I still believe him, but I have since learned that such practical ends are not the sole purpose of education.
I opened the book that evening, curious as to what I might have missed in my efforts to minimize the quarter's workload, and found more. I found myself in the middle of Montaigne's essay "On the Education of Children." Emerson once wrote that "within books, the good reader finds confidences, or asides, hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as if in a mind until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart." Such was my encounter with philosophy that evening. Montaigne's words did not claim some vacant chair inside my mind, as if at an auction, hoping to win its bid for my attention. They pounced on me, rather, drilled deep into my core, and dragged out gems I had long buried. "The first lessons in which we should steep [a student's] mind," I read, "must be those that regulate his behavior and his sense, that will teach him to know himself and to die well and to live well." Montaigne's words did not so much teach me anything new, as they reminded me of beliefs I had once held, of ideas I had previously known, but forgotten or discarded as childish and impractical.
That book, read numerous times since, served as a catalyst for both my personal and academic growth. Montaigne inspired me to stress the attainment of wisdom over the acquisition of knowledge. I used to study enough to gather the "facts" of a theory, my essays having been not much more than reports on those facts, perhaps, frosted over with a bit of commentary. I tasted ideas, chewed on them for as long