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Road to NALA CP Exam: I Eat a Whole Humble Pie

By Lynne DeVenny

If you're reading this, and you passed NALA's Certified Paralegal exam, please stop everything you are doing right now, and just pat yourself on the back, or shake your own hand, or announce to everyone within earshot, "Dang, I am all that and a bag of chips."

Because you are smart. Really smart. Even scary smart.

I never actually thought too much about the exam contents until I took a sample quiz from the Communications section last night.

Until last night, I was kind of proud of my communications. Until last night, I thought it was my lone super-power, you know, communicating. Back in the day, I had some bragging rights on the verbal section of the SAT, and as an undergraduate, I once made the only A for the semester in a graduate-level Shakespeare class. I also took five years of Latin.

But that was back in A.B.C. (almost before computers) when my brain cells were young and fat and full.

I really thought long and hard about whether I would even share this with Practical Paralegalism's readers, but I intended from the onset to be honest about this goal. So, to be honest, last night I would not have passed the Communications part of the NALA exam.

I mean, like I had to eat a whole humble pie.

This is going to be harder than I thought. When I whined to my friend Patti Clapper, ACP, who blogs at Patti's Paralegal Page, she emailed, "Yes, I agree that unless you have taken the exam, you really don't appreciate the difficulty of it!" I want to get that cross-stitched on a pillow for my bed so I'll see it every night before I go to sleep: "You really don't appreciate the difficulty of it."

Well, I do now.

On the bright side, I downloaded an awesome free iPad app, Vocabulary Bubble, which has a timer feature that makes it more exciting (well, for Grammar Geeks), and have been playing it every free second I get. I've either learned some new words, or remembered a few I'd forgotten.

Maybe I should call last night's first stab at the Communications section of the NALA CP exam, "Vocabulary Burst Your Bubble".

Full post as published by Practical Paralegalism on September 07, 2010 (boomark / email).