First Feedback

Caution: This post may contain higher than normal doses of whining.

We got our first memo back the other day and it was a bit humbling. As a former English/writing teacher, I feel a bit of pressure to do well in the legal writing aspect of law school. But more important, I, like so many others, would love to work for a journal, and in my third year I'd like to be a writing TA for the introductory LR&W sections (GW calls them "Dean's Fellows"). Of course, those goals would seem more realistic if I did well in my own legal writing assignments, and the first memo turned out, well, just ok. My writing is fine—no unnecessary passive voice, no filler, my memo is concise and precise. The problem: I didn't follow the right format.

The lesson is that in legal writing (or at least in my LR&W class), form is just as, if not more important than, function. You can communicate all your points clearly and concisely, but if you don't do it in the expected format, you'll do poorly. And that means following the format to the finest detail; virtually no deviation will go unpunished.

My instinctual reaction to that is resentment; I always taught my students that their primary goal should be to communicate clearly, and that form should follow function. However, I also taught them that good writing is all about pleasing the 800-lb gorilla, and if the gorilla wants your writing to take a certain form, you're not going to communicate clearly unless you follow that form. Too bad that lesson is sometimes hard to swallow.

I lost points for big things: My headings did not follow traditional outline format and I organized my discussion by level of authority rather than by legal issue. It made more sense to me to do it that way because several of the cases spoke to multiple issues. Oh well, I learned: Organize by issue.

I also lost points on some little things. My writing adjunct told us that our explanation should consist of paragraphs that begin with topic sentences that do not cite authority, but my writing TA didn't get that message and took points off for topic sentences with no citations. We were also supposed to use double-spaced, 12-pt, Times New Roman. I did, but since I use a Mac and Macs set type differently than does Windoze (and also maybe because there are multiple versions of Times New Roman produced by multiple font houses), my TA thought I'd cheated on font size and spacing to stay w/in the page limit. Strike another black mark on the long list of reasons the Microsoft computing hegemony is so so wrong.

But the font thing gets worse: When I explained the font size difference to my TA so she'd know for the next memo that I really am following the rules, she cautioned me that the judges of next spring's journals competition won't care about any explanations—if you don't set your type in 12-point Times New Roman (double-spaced) on a Windoze box (probably using MS Word), they will severely penalize your writing sample.

Hmph. That's good to know. Perhaps I should contact the people running the competition and ask them to be specific; if they're going to require people set their type on a Windoze machine they should say so, and if they're going to require competitors to use a specific word processor for setting that type, they should be clear about that, also. But that's the trouble with the Microsoft monopoly—the people running the journals competition probably won't feel a need to specify these things because they will assume everyone is going to use Windoze and Word. Yet they will penalize people who don't use Windoze and Word.

So not only does the Windoze monopoly potentially jeopardize national security, but it may also jeopardize my chances of writing onto a legal journal. Yay!

Posted October 30, 2003 06:56 AM | law school