文书写作指南大全（二）主题明确，问题具体
三、为什么你会独特，与人不同，比别人优秀？
从“与人不同”这个意义上说，例如，如果你是个年纪较大的申请人，是个少数民族，外国学生，运动员或音乐家，残疾人，或具有不寻常的学术或职业背景，利用从对你有利的这个角度，说明你的特别的背景将会给该学院和你申请的领域带来的好处。例如，对外国学生来说，一个有趣的题目可能是谈论这个国家的教育制度如何不同，为什么他们宁愿选择它而不想在自己的国家和/或用自己的语言学习。
但是，必须注意，在许多情况下，玩不同的牌倒会得到适得其反的结果。
如果你是个“多样性”的学生，当然就利用这一点。但不要为了多样而多样而反复地提，也不要认为由于“不同”本身就够你被录取。那样会使得我们觉得自己在被玩弄，同时也可能说明你不知道如何利用一次好的机会。只有那些能证明有重大残疾的人才应该写进文章里。我是说不是目前流行的诊断过分的残疾 du jour，在我的时代，这叫ADD。
其中的诀窍是把你的多样性与你的动机或品质，或你能给班级带来什么紧紧地结合起来。如果你不能做到，那你可能只是简单地提一提你与众不同的特点、背景或才能，而不是把它作为重点。这可是一个很有效的方法，因为它说明你对自己的条件和能力有信心，而且相信这些条件和能力会起作用。这就好象你只提到你是个盲人，或是从战争蹂躏的国家逃出的难民，或是一位提琴鉴赏家，但这些是为了在你那幅已经十分迷人的多彩的肖像上增加效果。
然而，有些申请人的问题正好相反。他们觉得强调自己与别人的差异很不自然。例如，职业换景员或年纪较大的申请人，有时觉得把自己的经历写进文章不一定保险，认为他们这样只能使别人注意到自己的大部分经历都在别的领域。如果你也象这样的话，不要忘记你过去的经验给你一个独特的观察问题的方法，因此你可以用你的文章把这个变成有利的一面，而不是不利的条件。还有一种选择，你可以取其相同点而不是不同面，通过对你目前工作领域所需要的技能和你将来在研究生院所需要的技能进行比较，使你的不同的职业经验变得有关了。这位作者（例5）就学习英国文学和当美国公民自由联盟志愿者的经验进行了比较。
例5：美国公民自由联盟（ACLU）志愿者
注意：为了教学目的，该文发表时未加修改。
When I began volunteering at the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, I was a doctoral candidate in English literature, a budding scholar of the early novel. By the time I stopped volunteering ten months later, I had learned that I wanted to become a litigator, a lawyer who brought his political beliefs and persuasive writing to bear on some of the most important social issues of the day. My experiences at the A.C.L.U. opened my eyes not only to the complexity and urgency of impassioned legal work but also to my own professional aspirations.
Under the supervision of the A.C.L.U.'s generous and busy legal director, I was quickly exposed to many aspects of practical lawyering. My first job-assessing and responding to the organization's voluminous mail-required me to analyze the fact patterns that various correspondents presented. The many incoming accounts of police brutality, judicial indifference, and prison rape were often moving and frequently suspect. They forced me to temper my emotional responses and determine whether the complaints seemed both factually plausible and within the A.C.L.U.'s limited purview. After this challenging introduction, I was then asked to assist in the discovery phase of a prisoner's rights case. This work was detailed and intricate: my job was to reconstruct the specific events of a day in 1991 while searching for conflicts between the prison's official regulations and the actual conduct of its guards. As I called Michigan prisons for information, sifted through ten years of our client's prison records, and helped endlessly revise our pleadings, I learned a good deal about the small chores and thankless legal persistence that go into building cases.
At the same time, I found considerable overlap between my new legal tasks and my ongoing academic work. In an A.C.L.U. case I assisted in, for example, a judge overturned a state ban on partial birth abortion because the procedure had no precise meaning in the graduate lexicon, and the legislation might thus chill a wide variety of graduate practices. What fascinated me was that when confronted with the task of interpreting a knotty and important text, the twentieth-century legal system made many of the same interpretive moves as the eighteenth-century novel readers I had studied in my English graduate work. As the case unfolded, the pleadings debated the legislators' authorial intentions; the relevant Supreme Court and Sixth Circuit precedents; the contradictory testimony of various graduate experts; and, finally, the language of the statute itself. Like my eighteenth-century readers, modern textual interpreters were attempting to make sense of a silent, ambiguous document by finding ways to situate it within different historical, intertextual, and linguistic contexts. While particular interpretive conventions have changed over the centuries-modern lawyers cite prior cases and not Biblical parables to bolster their arguments-I came to realize that the broader task of comprehending texts (whether artistic expression or legislation) has not. Moreover, as I roamed through the stacks of Michigan's graduate and law libraries, I increasingly began to believe that it is precisely through interpretation, through embracing particular readings of Robinson Crusoe over others or through fighting over the legal standing of terms such as "partial birth bortion" that a society obliquely expresses its priorities and values as well as its blind spots.
I began making these connections partly because my work on the prisoner's rights case had forced me to question my own values and unspoken assumptions. Was I being co-opted by working on behalf of an unrepentant racist and murderer who complained at having some writings and a swastika confiscated by prison officials? Or was I defending the