Writing a Compelling Statement of the Issue

Here is a column that I wrote for At Issue, the electronic newsletter of the Pennsylvania Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Division. In it, I illustrate several ways to write the Statement of the Issue for the defendant in the Miranda case. Here is my closing paragraph:

As these examples show, you can draft

more compelling issue statements by using

some or all of these techniques—placing

pieces of information in an order that is

easy to read, numbering items in a list of

facts, using a tabular format, and using

more than one sentence to state the issue.

You can access the column here (p. 3).

(ljs)