Legal Writing Prof Blog

I'm just sayin'...

Thank you to Hillary Burgess, who has written about "Why Skills Ain't Easy: The Deceptive Difficulty Discovered in the Cognitive Taxonomy of Legal Learning Objectives", in the spring 2012 issue of The Law Teacher.

Here is how she summarizes her work:

"When looking at many courses that are dubbed 'skills' courses, many law professors have the initial reaction that they are 'easier' than doctrinal courses. In my forthcoming article, The Taxonomy of Legal Learning Objectives and Outcome Measurements, I demonstrate that skills are both more difficult to teach and more difficult to learn than concepts. Concepts include doctrine, policy, theory, and facts.

"Many law professors might be reluctant to accept this hierarchy of difficulty. However, there is general consensus across the most widely accepted educational taxonomies that skills are harder to learn and harder to teach than concepts. So, the question becomes, why do law school 'skills' courses appear easier to teach and learn than courses that teach doctrine and theory?

"This article explains why skills courses appear to be easier, but aren't. The article also discusses the factors that force professors who teach skills to create skills learning objectives that are sometimes entry-level skills."

(spl)

 

Who succeeds in legal writing courses?

Professor Karin Mika of Cleveland-Marshall College of Law has uploaded an informative article about the backgrounds of legal writing students. Based on data she collected from her students during eighteen years of teaching, she looked at the relationship between various factors and grades in legal writing. Her analysis showed a correlation between the students’ legal writing grades and their law school grades. But there was no clear correlation between particular undergraduate majors and success in legal writing, with one exception: an undergraduate economics major was a valid predictor of success. Mika also looked into the effects of other factors such as age and graduation from public versus private colleges. Click here for more details about her conclusions.

(jdf)

LWI One-Day Workshops - Registration Now Open!

The Legal Writing Institute will hold one-day workshops at various locations around the country on Friday, December 2, 2011. Registration is now open.  Here is a list of the law schools confirmed to host:

• California:  Loyola Law School, Los Angeles
• Florida:  University of Miami
• Georgia:  Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School
• Illinois:  Chicago-Kent College of Law
• Massachusetts:  Northeastern University School of Law, Boston
• Minnesota:  Hamline University School of Law
• Missouri:  University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law
• New York:  Brooklyn Law School
• Ohio:  The Ohio State University
• North Carolina:  Campbell University Wiggins School of Law, Raleigh
• Pennsylvania:  Temple University Beasley School of Law, Philadelphia
• Tennessee:  University of Memphis Humphreys School of Law
• Washington, D.C./Northern Virginia:  George Mason University School of Law, Arlington, Virginia

The topics covered in the workshops have been expanded to include four areas during the day.  Some locations will have slightly different topics or times.  The program in Minnesota will include a field trip to West Publishing.

 

1.  Teaching Legal Writing [9:00 to 10:20 a.m.] (including topics such as creating problems, grading, selecting materials, conducting paper conferences, and including other assignments as part of the research and writing course). 

2.  Teaching Persuasive  Writing, Appellate Advocacy, and Moot Court [10:40 to noon] (including materials, practice sessions, and guidelines for moot court practices and competitions).

3.  Legal Research Update [2:00 to 3:20 p.m.] (including updates on new research methods and materials that you and your students need to know).

4.  Other Innovations [3:40 to 5:00 p.m.] (a potpourri panel that will differ at each location, where individual speakers and faculty roundtables can discuss classroom teaching innovations, scholarship opportunities, effective use of researh assistants, and other subjects of interest to legal research and writing faculty).

 

The workshops have been a great opportunity for legal writing faculty around the county to meet and share new ideas.  Adjunct faculty who are often unable to travel have found the sessions to be particularly valuable, but as you can see from the topics they are now designed for all legal writing faculty.  The programs have also been of interest to persons who are thinking about entering the legal writing academy as teachers. Those presenting at the workshops have found them to be a great speaking opportunity too.

 

The one-day workshops are a fundraiser for the Legal Writing Institute to allow it to continue its many fine and important programs.  Attendees are asked to pay a $100 registration fee, which will be donated to the LWI.  As in past years, scholarships for attendees will be available to persons who cannot pay the registration fee.  Law schools who host these generously donate the facilities and often also donate coffee and lunch to make the day particularly wonderful for us. 

Click here to register.

(mew)

Passing the giggle test

Earlier on this blog, I reported that the Second Circuit had applied a “straight face test” when evaluating an argument. Jim McElhaney's article in the November ABA Journal offers a similar “giggle test.” McElhaney's fictional Judge Wallop criticizes new lawyers as not having “the common sense to know when an argument is a loser.” Under Wallop’s giggle test, a lawyer should submit only arguments that can be made “with a straight face”—that is, arguments that are “factually and emotionally plausible.” That’s good advice for legal writing students too.

(jdf)

are legal writing professors likeable?

"Does the appearance of an instructor and the format of the class influence student grades and learning? We tested this question with 861 undergraduate students who completed an online questionnaire rating their instructors. Students were equally spread across class year and were from different majors. We used multiple regression analyses and found that likable, good-looking, well-dressed, and approachable teachers had students who said they learned more, had higher grades, and liked the class better."

Read more here.

hat tip:  Stephanie West Allen

(spl)

 

Not-So-Spooky Advice from Stephen King

Over at The Faculty Lounge, a timely post for Halloween recognizes the writing wisdom of one of America's creepiest writers, Stephen King.  This gave me the idea to compile some of the wisdom from his book on writing, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, as fright night draws to a close.

Thoughts on word choice:

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones.  This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes.  The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.  Make yourself a solemn promise right now that you'll never use 'emolument' when you mean 'tip'...

On criticism:

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.

On reading:

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.

Writing as an earnest craft:

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Even if you are not working on the Great American Horror Novel, King's advice hits the mark.  Hopefully whatever you and your students are writing this fall is more of a treat than a trick.

(dbb)

Justice Scalia's style

A recent short article focuses on Justice Antonin Scalia’s rhetorical skills. Jeffrey Shaman  of DePaul University College of Law describes Scalia as “one helluva stylist,” whose work is “distinguished by a flair for being strikingly sharp and clever.” Shaman recounts Scalia's use of pointed language to criticize other justices—for example, when he called one of Justice Kennedy’s opinions “tutti-frutti.”  And Shaman points out that despite Scalia's opposition to citing foreign law, the Justice does use foreign phrases. He may twist one for effect, as when he morphed "Pax Romana" into “Pax Roeana” to describe the effect of a decision on abortion.  

(jdf)