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Writing is extremely important in every aspect that it is used, of course it will be that much more in law school. From the writing on final exams to writing on to law review, how one writes in law school will determine grades and then eventually their job placement. Im an average write at best. Is there anything I can do to improve my writing that much more before my 1l year? Instead of reading E&Es and case law before heading into law school, I want to become an efficient and clear writer.

Read "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser and "Legal Writing in Plain English" by Bryan Garner. Both really awesome books.

Ben Franklin was a terrible writer initially, but became a legendary writer by writing and getting critical feedback. A very unoriginal method, but very effective. Learn about structure as well.

Strunk and White.

Don't read E&E's or case law, but in retrospect I think reading law review articles would have been useful

hangingtree wrote:Don't read E&E's or case law, but in retrospect I think reading law review articles would have been useful

WTF? Why would you want to emulate a law review? That shit's beyond useless.

I did not consider myself a great writer prior to coming to law school. I still don't consider myself "great" by any stretch. However, I was able to drastically improve my writing both before, and during law school.

As far as classes/law review - submit sample written answers to profs during the semester (if they accept these) and apply their feedback to the test. Each prof has a different style, but some general themes will be consistent (conciseness being the most important - for exams at least).

Law Review - Just pick up a few copies of your schools LR and emulate the previous student notes/comments. Actual writing skill will matter less than following the style that the student editors are looking for.

Actual Legal work (i.e. Summer Associate, part-time clerk, post-grad) - Read the books that others have suggested (On Writing Well, Legal Writing in Plain English, etc.), but also try and land a district/appellate court externship. For me, it has 1) given me concrete examples of good - and bad - work product and 2) forced me to work on "real life" problems, as opposed to legal writing class.

Few other things that have been helpful: 1) slowing down, 2) obsessively ensuring that my work is mistake free the first time (its much less time consuming to do this than to spend a lot of time editing your work) and 3) Reading a lot - and by this, I mean reading novels, newspapers, etc.

First Offense wrote:

hangingtree wrote:Don't read E&E's or case law, but in retrospect I think reading law review articles would have been useful

WTF? Why would you want to emulate a law review? That shit's beyond useless.

Agree in almost all instances, except when you are actually in the process of writing-on to your school's law review. In that case, its helpful to emulate the format. That being said, emulating typical law review writing style for either law school tests or law firm work product would be a disaster.

I've always been a bad writer, but I ended up being decent at legal writing, mostly because it's straightforward and you don't have to worry about flourishes and metaphors

The people who have trouble are creative writers. Legal writing is dull and repetitive and is the bane to those who have always been taught to make your writing interesting. One professor knocked me down a full grade because my essay was interesting to read and had all the information but since it wasn't clinical and straightforward, she hated it. To much fluff, not enough stuff.

cwscooby wrote:The people who have trouble are creative writers. Legal writing is dull and repetitive and is the bane to those who have always been taught to make your writing interesting. One professor knocked me down a full grade because my essay was interesting to read and had all the information but since it wasn't clinical and straightforward, she hated it. To much fluff, not enough stuff.

So much this.

The Legal Writing at my school is graded based on how well you can regurgitate the writing samples you're given. Any deviations from the samples and you risk losing points.

Legal Writing is utterly the most dull, repetitive, mundane, void-of-creativity exercise you will ever encounter. The writing/creative writing classes I took in college, like the previous poster said, actually hurt me. If you can write short, simple, clear sentences then you're golden.

acr wrote:

cwscooby wrote:The people who have trouble are creative writers. Legal writing is dull and repetitive and is the bane to those who have always been taught to make your writing interesting. One professor knocked me down a full grade because my essay was interesting to read and had all the information but since it wasn't clinical and straightforward, she hated it. To much fluff, not enough stuff.

So much this.

The Legal Writing at my school is graded based on how well you can regurgitate the writing samples you're given. Any deviations from the samples and you risk losing points.

Legal Writing is utterly the most dull, repetitive, mundane, void-of-creativity exercise you will ever encounter. The writing/creative writing classes I took in college, like the previous poster said, actually hurt me. If you can write short, simple, clear sentences then you're golden.

Yep, I third this commentary. Here's one thing that you don't need a book for, OP, and which hits multiple people numerous times throughout 1L year: know what passive voice is and eliminate it from your life; know what active voice is and never stop using it.

acr wrote:

cwscooby wrote:The people who have trouble are creative writers. Legal writing is dull and repetitive and is the bane to those who have always been taught to make your writing interesting. One professor knocked me down a full grade because my essay was interesting to read and had all the information but since it wasn't clinical and straightforward, she hated it. To much fluff, not enough stuff.

So much this.

The Legal Writing at my school is graded based on how well you can regurgitate the writing samples you're given. Any deviations from the samples and you risk losing points.

Legal Writing is utterly the most dull, repetitive, mundane, void-of-creativity exercise you will ever encounter. The writing/creative writing classes I took in college, like the previous poster said, actually hurt me. If you can write short, simple, clear sentences then you're golden.

Yep, I third this commentary. Here's one thing that you don't need a book for, OP, and which hits multiple people numerous times throughout 1L year: know what passive voice is and eliminate it from your life; know what active voice is and never stop using it.

Write 4000+ word stream-of-consciousness papers on various topics that a friend assigns you. Give yourself a time limit of 3 hours. Then go back in and find an academic authority for everything you said and cite it using Bluebook citation. Enjoy your summer.

Thank you for the answers, it will help me a lot.

Guys, now I'm writing essay in college and I need a little help. Who can help me with ideas and questions about the structure of the text?

You should get in the habit of writing clearly and concisely, and mechanically. I think random things on the latter could be helpful - like planning a recipe for a cake. You may have several steps in the process and several options at each step, then objectively analyzing which is best. However, I'm not sure how valuable doing this is beyond getting a feel for the way you should be thinking.

I would recommend reading Getting to Maybe before law school and again before exams. Its value before law school is more in telling you how you should start to think than in how to prepare for exams. Its value once you're in law school is the latter.

I was an arts major in college, and while I was probably among the most developed creative writers, I was probably among the weakest academic/law school writers when I started. Fortunately for me, law school grading tends to be based on how you think about issues and communicate that thinking to your readers, not how pretty it is. If you can think about an issue in multiple ways, and communicate those thoughts clearly, it doesn't really matter how good of an academic writer you are.

I wouldn't have necessarily thought to write in depth about multiple sides of an issue if I didn't read Getting to Maybe as in high school I was taught to just be a confident and opinionated writer. Given my lack of preparation for law school, that book might have been the difference between being far above median and far below median. Not everyone knows how you're supposed to write law school exams. At a t-14, I'd say for everyone who gets an A, there is one student who simply doesn't know how to take a law school exam who is capable of performing far better.

There are also subtle things you can start thinking about that influence blind grading. Unlike college, being a teacher's pet has no value and will only annoy your peers. However, professors are still human so even with blind grading are still capable of being manipulated into giving you better grades. One thing I tried to do was identify something unique to the professor or that they are passionate about at some point during the semester, and find a way to always implement that into the exam. I once had a professor make an offhanded comment about how a certain law was probably implemented to disadvantage African-American farmers and made a note to throw that in if it was ever even questionably relevant. I also once had a professor who was a Stephen King fan with a sense of humor so made the first few pages of my exam "All work and no play makes blind grading #xxxx a dull boy".

These won't make or break your exam, but in my experience was the difference between an A- and an A, and also offset weaker grammar and writing. It's a small sample, but I found that by using this technique, I'd generally get a mark higher than friends who hit all of the same issues and were better writers.