LNAT Essay: A Complete Guide to Section B

Section B of the LNAT consists of three essay questions from which students must choose one to answer. The questions are usually on topics from current affairs, or social or political issues. You will have 40 minutes to write an essay of a recommended length of 500-600 words – and not more than 750 words.

Although the essay is not formally marked (you will never receive a score for Section B, unlike the multiple-choice Section A), for many of the best universities for Law in the UK, it is of high importance in deciding whether or not to make you an offer. Oxford in particular is known to place great weight on your performance in Section B.

If you want to study an LLB degree at a top university, then, you’ll need to do well in the LNAT essay. In this guide, we’ll take you through how to achieve just that – from preparing to writing, you’ll learn how to structure an LNAT essay that will impress the examiners.

How to Prepare for the LNAT Essay

Reading

You should begin your preparation for Section B months in advance – and in fact, many of the strongest candidates will have unwittingly been sharpening their skills for years before they even think of taking the LNAT.

This is because one of the most important things you can do is to become well read in current affairs. Almost every LNAT question touches on a live political, social, or economic issue. For reasons we’ll discuss later, understanding these issues, what’s at stake, and the common types of arguments made on all sides of the debate will place you at a significant advantage.

If you don’t already, start by reading good quality newspapers. More important than the news articles themselves are the comment pieces, in which commentators will usually take a side on one of the pressing questions in public life. Try to read a range of perspectives, not just those you instinctively agree with. You should aim to read several of these articles a week for at least 3 months before the LNAT so that you build up your familiarity with the most pressing issues in current affairs and what different views are on them.

If you have time alongside your current affairs reading, it’s well worth learning more about logic, argumentation, critical thinking, and essay structure. Here are a few books which will help you understand how arguments work, spot flaws in others’ arguments (and avoid them in your own), and write with clarity and persuasiveness:

Being Logical: A Guide to Good Thinking – D.Q. McInerny

Critical Thinking Skills: Effective Analysis, Argument and Reflection – Stella Cottrell

Thank You for Arguing – Jay Heinrichs

Practising

From 2-3 months before you’re due to take the LNAT, you should start practising your Section B answers. Unfortunately the number of LNAT past papers available online is very modest. Oxford have a few sample LNAT essay questions for you to try. You will very rapidly see the types of question that get asked, however, and a teacher or LNAT tutor will be able to set you more for further practice.

Begin with untimed practice, focusing on preparing and writing a clear, well argued essay. Once you’ve tried your hand at a few of these, you should start timing yourself – making sure to stick to the 40-minute limit. You should write at least three (and preferably more) timed answers before you come to take the LNAT for real. Ask a teacher or tutor to mark the essays for you and provide feedback.

While you’re practising, it’s also important to stay under the 750-word limit (and ideally between 500-600). Being concise and punchy with your writing is a skill that can be learned but you need to train your brain to write that way well in advance of the final exam. The LNAT is computer-based so it’s best to type your answers when practising.

Another exercise you can do is just to practise planning answers. You’ll have 5-10 minutes to plan your LNAT essay in the exam (more on that in a moment), so for bitesize prep you could take half an hour to come up with three essay plans, skipping the writing part. Only do this once you’ve practised writing the essays many times, though!

Work with an LNAT tutor

For the highest level of personal preparation, we recommend working with an LNAT tutor. Our tutors are graduates of top universities (typically Oxbridge) who scored highly on the LNAT themselves.

They can set you practice essays, mark them, and provide feedback to improve your performance. Our students improve their admissions test scores by 25% on average after just four hours of tutoring.

Planning LNAT Section B

Planning is absolutely key to writing a good LNAT essay. In fact, we’d go so far as to say that a successful LNAT essay simply cannot be written without a solid plan. Given the time constraints, you might be tempted to dive straight in and start writing your essay. Do not do this!

Devoting up to ten minutes planning will ensure your essay is clear, well argued, and well structured – all points handsomely rewarded by examiners. Having a clear plan will also help you know what you are going to say, keeping your writing concise and focused, preventing you from rambling and losing your thread midway, and saving you time in the long run.

We would encourage you to divide your time for Section B as follows:

• 5-10 minutes selecting your question and planning
• 25-30 minutes writing
• 5 minutes checking and editing – use this time to cut unnecessary words and sentences and ensure your argument is clear and concise

Selecting your question

You have a choice of three questions in Section B, from which you must select one. Which should you go for? Here are a few rules to keep in mind (obvious ones first):

1. If you don’t understand a question – because there are terms in there that you’re not familiar with or because you’re not certain, for any other reason, what it’s asking – don’t answer it!
2. If you’ve never heard of the issue it’s asking about or are only vaguely aware of it, don’t answer it. Although you’re not rewarded for stating lots of facts and datapoints related to the topic (in fact, this is almost always a bad idea), if you are really unfamiliar with the issue, then your arguments are likely to be rudimentary, misguided, or just obvious. This will not help you perform well.
3. If you have a really strong opinion on the question, don’t answer it. You might find this surprising but the LNAT themselves say “We are also not very interested in your opinions…Sometimes you may do better if you attempt to defend a position that you do not agree with personally.”

So, where does this leave you? The ideal LNAT question will be one which you understand thoroughly, on a subject you are familiar with, but where your ability to construct an interesting argument will not be obstructed by a very strong personal opinion.

Ultimately, the key is this: which question, as you read it, causes ideas to leap out at you? Seeing as you have so little time to plan and write, you should pick the question for which you think you can generate a number of solid arguments quickly.

Make sure you read the question very carefully (at least twice) and understand exactly what it is asking. Your whole LNAT essay could be spoiled by carelessness here.

Creating an essay plan

Once you’ve selected your question, take a minute or two to write down all the ideas and arguments which occur to you – on all sides of the question. Once you have these, you must decide which side you are going to argue. You absolutely cannot sit on the fence – the LNAT and top universities are very clear about this.

Then select your strongest arguments and organise them into the structure we will discuss below. You’ll need two separate arguments on your side and one counterargument (as well as a reason why that counterargument doesn’t outweigh your arguments).

LNAT Essay Structure

How should you structure an LNAT essay? Fortunately, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. A clear, well-argued essay which follows a familiar structure will be rewarded by the examiners.

Introduction

In your introduction you should do a few important things:

Summarise the background

Begin with a sentence or two outlining the background to the question and setting up the debate. ‘National service involves the conscription, typically of young people, into roles in the military, usually for a limited time of a year or two. In the UK, it was in place up until the 1960s to bolster military recruitment and to instil a sense of national pride and civic duty in young people.’

Interrogate key terms

Analyse the key terms of the question which you will form the crux of your argument. For instance, for the question ‘“It is right that students should contribute to the cost of their degrees.” Do you agree?’, you might want to analyse the term ‘right’. ‘Right’ in this context could mean morally correct, socially just, financially prudent, or several other things. Which of these meanings will you be referring to when you use the word ‘right’ in your essay?

State your assumptions

We already mentioned that you shouldn’t overburden your essay with facts and figures. The examiners are more interested in an argument that is clear, concise, and coherent than one which draws on banks of evidence. Making assumptions in this case is fine – but you need to be clear what they are. The LNAT give the example of a question on healthcare in rich and poor countries. A good essay might state “I will assume that the demand for health care is growing, and will continue to grow, out of proportion to supply. That being so, what can be done to ensure that rich countries don’t monopolize it?”

State your argument

This is so crucial and cannot under any circumstances be missed. Say upfront what you will be arguing and briefly state why. ‘I will argue that national service should not be re-introduced in the UK, as the nature of the military has changed so much since it was abolished that it would no longer serve a useful purpose in society.’

Remember that you don’t have many words or much time so all this needs to be done as briefly and concisely as possible.

Argument paragraphs

Next, you need two paragraphs on your side of the argument. Each paragraph should contain a single, distinct argument. Don’t be tempted to chuck in extra points as they occur to you and don’t write one long argument split over two paragraphs. That said, the best essays will have a good flow and one paragraph will transition nicely into the next.

Each paragraph should begin with a clear topic sentence, stating what your argument for this paragraph will be. Then explain your rationale over the next few sentences, arguing clearly and logically. End the paragraph with a concluding sentence that follows on from the previous few and re-asserts the argument you outlined in the topic sentence.

Counter-argument

Your fourth paragraph should present a counter-argument to your main arguments. This is needed to show that you have considered other points of view. It might be useful to signal you are beginning your counter-argument paragraph with a phrase like ‘On the other hand, it could be argued that…’

The counter-argument paragraph should follow the same structure as your argument paragraphs, except once you have re-asserted the counter-argument, you need an extra section at the end. This should explain why the counter-argument is not wholly valid, or, even if it is true, it does not outweigh the strength of your main arguments.

For tactical reasons, you should avoid making your counter-argument either too weak or too strong. Too weak and it will look like a straw man and that you haven’t properly weighed up other perspectives. Too strong and it risks undermining your main arguments.

Conclusion

In your LNAT essay conclusion, you should re-state your argument, explain why you have reached it, and then broaden your perspective out. What is the significance of your conclusion, how does it relate to other problems in society, and what wider implications might it have?

Extra Tips for the LNAT Essay

If you really want to perform well in Section B of the LNAT, here are a few extra tips to take your essay to the next level.

Go for the difficult question and argue the difficult side

An Oxford admissions tutor at Jesus College has advised students that to impress examiners with your argumentative skills, it’s best to set yourself the hardest challenge. How can you do this? By selecting the most difficult question of the three available and arguing the most difficult side of that question.

Especially if you’re well read in current affairs, you might have a sense of which opinions are widely held in society and which are seen as controversial. Taking the side of an unpopular opinion and arguing it persuasively will really make your essay stand out. Remember that the LNAT is taken by aspiring lawyers – and it’s the highest paid, most in-demand barristers who can defend an apparently hopeless case and win it!

Be creative with your arguments

LNAT examiners read hundreds of essays and they will rapidly get bored of reading the same, unimaginative arguments in response to questions. Set yourself apart from the crowd by coming with creative, unexpected arguments – whether that’s a unique take on a key term in the question or a bold and original piece or reasoning.

This is another reason why it’s useful to read widely in current affairs. If you do this, you will develop a sense of what the ‘classic’ positions are in response to common issues. If you avoid rehearsing these familiar arguments and come up with something original, you’ll catch the examiners’ attention.

Do you need lots of facts / knowledge to write a good LNAT essay?

The LNAT themselves seem to give out contradictory advice on whether you need to bring prior knowledge to a question to write a good Section B answer.

On the one hand, they state, “We don’t care whether you have any data about the topic. An argument based on assumptions can be just as good as an argument based on information.”

But elsewhere, they say that the LNAT essay tests whether you are “‘well-read’ with a good knowledge of current affairs”.

The truth is that dumping lots of facts into your essay will not help you and will probably stand in the way of writing a clear argument. However, if you don’t know anything about the issue at hand, your answer might be too basic, misguided, or unoriginal.

To write a successful essay, then, it helps to know a good deal about the topic in question and the types of arguments people make about it, but to ensure that your arguments are always well structured and developed from first principles, with any assumptions you’re making clearly stated.

Top LNAT essay mistakes to avoid

An Oxford admissions tutor at Jesus College has stated that 75% of papers submitted to Oxford makes one of these mistakes:

Irresolute

This is where you don’t know what your answer is. You need to have a pithy one-line answer to the question (which should be stated in the introduction and conclusion).

Indecisive

This is where you sit on the fence and don’t come down on one side of the question.

Imprecise

This is where you are vague or sloppy with the language you use in your answer. Make sure you use the language of the question. Don’t use near synonyms or roughly similar terms. The examiner wants to read an answer to this specific question, not a different one.

Inconsistent

This is when you start your essay arguing for one side but end up contradicting yourself or changing your mind. Planning properly will ensure you never fall into this trap.

Indignant

This is where you write that you don’t agree with the question or how it’s framed and decide to answer something else. As with the ‘Imprecise’ mistake, if you do this then you are failing to answer the question you have been asked.

Be sure to avoid these pitfalls and you will automatically put yourself in the top 25% of all Oxford LNAT candidates.

LNAT Sample Essays

You can read official model LNAT essays here:

• Sample essay 1
• Sample essay 2
• Sample essay 3

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