First-year legal writing mistakes & how to avoid them

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Student LawyerIn undergrad, you were a term paper pro. You could crank out thought-provoking three- to five-page term papers replete with resplendent prose and droll, pithy observations, impressing your professors by transforming minutiae into master­pieces. You razzle-dazzled them with all your word bling.

In law school, no one is impressed by your word bling. Less is more, especially when it gets right down to business. Legal writers are rewarded for conciseness, precision, sophisticated analysis, and ef­fective communication.

Hot tips for new (and not so new) legal writers in my article, First-year legal writing mistakes & how to avoid them, in the ABA Student Lawyer. New legal writers often carry college writing tactics with them to law school like inflating ideas, using fancy words (word bling!), and “more is more.” This idea inflation conflates with students wanting to “sound like a lawyer,” cranking out papers loaded with legalese and quotations.

My article suggests a few easy fixes: cut to the chase, use your words, and lead your reader. Read all about it here.

Reflective Practice in Legal Education: “Debriefing” Our Work

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Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.

So begins Tim Casey’s article, Reflective Practice in Legal Education: The Stages of Reflection, published in the Clinical Law Review. I had the pleasure of witnessing Casey’s presentation on Reflecting Practice in Legal Education at the Legal Writing Institute’s One Day Workshop.

Casey notes that while the ABA accreditation standards require externship programs to include reflective practice, few legal educators have studied the process of reflection, developed models for reflective practice, or know how to teach reflective practice. Casey’s article excellently defines reflective practice, then thoroughly outlines the stages of reflective practice using concepts from cognitive psychology and education theory.

In his presentation, Casey discussed moving law students from thinking about the “self,” concretely, and dualistically to thinking more universally/globally, abstractly, and contextually.

[Read more…]

Measuring Law Student Learning Outcomes Using Pre and Post Testing

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I have written about the counter-intuitive value of pre-testing, giving a test of material not yet learned, in order to prime the brain for learning to come and establish expectations for learning objectives.

I have since stumbled across an article by David J. Herring and Collin Lynch, Measuring Law Student Learning Outcomes: 2013 Lawyering Class. Herring and Lynch discuss the ABA’s potential shift from input measures to output measures for legal education, increasing the focus on establishing learning outcomes as well as ongoing evaluation of the attainment of established outcomes.

Herring and Lynch used a pre- and post-test design for comparison within one particular subject, focusing on measuring the core skill of legal reading and cross-case reasoning. The researchers found that in contrast to traditional law teaching alone, pre-test followed by supplemental instructional interventions, produced significant learning gains. For more about the study and results, see Measuring Law Student Learning Outcomes: 2013 Lawyering Class.

Shortcut: Harnessing the Power of the Analogical Instinct

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Analogies are not just used by legal writers. According to a recent post on Fast Company, The Creative Life by David Zax, the most creative problem solvers in many industries draw from diverse sources of information to harness the usefulness of analogies. Zax interviewed John Pollack, former Bill Clinton speechwriter and author of new book Shortcut. According to Pollack, the “analogical instinct” – the ability to see how things are like other things is at the root of innovation.

Analogies work because they make the unfamiliar familiar; they help the mind navigate new terrain by making it resemble terrain we already know…. An analogy is a comparison that suggests parallels between two different things, explicitly or implicitly.

Developing analogies requires seeing past superficial differences separating things and looking beyond the surface – not at the actual thing itself, but at what it represents. Good legal writers explore analogies to find connections between ideas. With these connections, good legal writers show (or create) familiarity with unfamiliar concepts and can harness the power of the analogical instinct. Pollack’s book, Shortcut, How Analogies Reveal Connections, Spark Innovation, and Sell Our Greatest Ideas, should be on every good legal writer’s “must read” list.

 

 

The Handwriting v. Typing Note Taking Debate

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Handwriting and idea generation go hand in hand. Researchers suggest that students may learn better when they take notes by hand, that the act of “putting it down” on paper forces the writer to focus on what is really important. According to a recent article from Pam A. Mueller of Princeton and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of UCLA, The Pen is Mightier Than The Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand over Laptop Note Taking, students learn more effectively when handwriting notes versus typing.

Many legal educators have criticized the distracting nature of computers and the negative effects of computing/multi-tasking on the decline in students’ note-taking skills. But, what if the answer is much simpler – that it is the lack of handwriting itself, not necessarily any distraction inherent in laptop usage, causing the decline.

Let’s be honest. Not every handwriter is a good note taker (just by virtue of being a handwriter).  Every student should be instructed in effective note taking – whether on paper or on screen. Every student should be instructed to listen for structure and cues, to reframe concepts, to review notes, and to restructure notes for maximum effectiveness and understanding.

Additionally, laptops aren’t only used for note taking in the classroom. For example, in my legal writing classroom, students don’t have much lecture to capture with their keyboards. Class time is spent actively, with students working on writing exercises, student samples, and where laptops are more commonly used for individual and group in-class research.

Let’s not be too hasty to blame laptops on our students’ note taking and learning short comings. Perhaps we should also examine our own teaching methods first.