In front of you, a blank canvas stares back, ready to be filled but only reflecting a harsh stillness.

The cursor blinks at you, urging you for your next order.

Cold sweat squeezes out of pores you didn’t even realize you had on your body. 

“…”

You decide to hit the books and videos again. Maybe you just need to know more… Maybe you’ll get ’em next time…

You’re mostly grasping the material, but then when you take a practice exam it’s like everything you know is out the window. If you can't start (or finish) an essay, you may be struggling with this Blank Page Syndrome.

WTF? Why didn’t it work?

If all you did was memorize some rule as a fact, your body has no clue what it needs to do, because...

1. Knowing something conceptually is different from knowing how to use it.
2. You treated everything the same. You tried to juggle everything in your memory without considering whether a rule (or issue) is even important enough to focus on.
3. You neglected to learn the corresponding issues. Like a joke you wanted to force into a conversation, you couldn’t wait to use the rules and concepts you learned. But you didn’t know when they were relevant or appropriate to bring up, so you tried to put them somewhere… anywhere.

Even if you know all the law, you still need to present all the relevant issues.

Two biggest fears and obsessions of a bar taker: lectures and memorization. But notice that these heavily focus on the RULES, the "black letter law."

That's all fine and dandy. Rules are important. But how are you going to know where to put down what you memorized?

What were those three years of law school for? Never mind.

There’s this strange concern floating around... A concern that you need to know it all, or else you won’t be prepared to write that essay. The thought that all you need to do well in practice and the bar exam itself is to "get your ducks in a row first"…

So you sit there, fold your arms, and wait for videos and words to osmosis into your brain. Maybe your soulmate will fall out of the sky, too. And then when you finally flip open that bar essay after weeks of becoming a know-it-all…

You end up staring at a blank page.

No doubt the essays are the bane of bar takers' existence. It can feel overwhelming to have to come up with words and create something under pressure.

If writing like in law school is still stuck in your head, you've been out of school for years, or you just aren't used to that kind of writing, essay questions on the bar exam can be tough to figure out.

Like with a new cat you just met, maybe you've noticed that they need a different approach because they’re a bit different from law school essays or real-life briefs.

Somehow you find yourself brain dumping a soup of words, anything you remember about the subject… silently hoping for a miracle (and screaming internally).

(Ernest Hemingway said that “the first draft of anything is shit,” but this is ridiculous!)

But what gets you that passing score? How do you organize your answer? Where do you begin, and what do you write?

Issues.

Issues are where it all begins.

No issues = no IRAC = no points. 

You may think you know the rules, but you still struggle to write the essay because you don't know the corresponding issues.

You want to score high on the essays, but the grading process is so subjective, and there are often no guidelines as to what will earn you points or how much time should be spent writing different parts of your paper—making essays like taking shots in the dark.

Clear issues make it EASY for the grader to check it off as they skim your essay. This makes the grading process more objective and more in your favor.

Having the right issues can make or break your essay. They're your anchors for the ship you're going to ride to fish points out of the water.

This is super counterintuitive to bar takers! In law school, they were taught that they need to write a giant analysis and look at all the angles. In fact, some bar tutors still advocate for this approach.

I don't disagree.

But essays on the bar exam are like an inverted pyramid, where issues are the most important, then the rules, then the application. (No deep “analysis” required except where appropriate (to discuss opposing legal theories or narrow calls of the question), not as a default!)