The Writing Tip of the Day
by
Donna Greschner

Old methods sometimes work the best. Although Web bins, Power Point, and interactive chat rooms are effective instructional aids, law professors still succeed with tried-and-true methods of teaching. Last year I improved students' legal reasoning and writing skills by combining conventional pedagogical techniques in "The Writing Tip of the Day."

In Saskatchewan, second-year students must take one legal theory course. Each course has 20 students and meets twice a week. Since one purpose of these courses is to develop writing skills, students must submit two papers, one midway through the term and the second on the last day of classes. Over the past decade, I have tried various techniques in legal theory courses to enhance the students' writing proficiency. I now teach Constitutional Theory, a course designed to raise issues of legal philosophy in the context of constitutional law.

In 2001, I decided to spend the first five minutes of each class giving students one tip about good writing. Before I began, I impressed upon them the importance of becoming the best writers they could be. Words are the only tools that lawyers possess, and the more adeptly that students handle words, the better lawyers they will become. To complement and set the stage for the "Writing Tip of the Day," I devoted one entire class during the first week of the term to matters of style, grammar, and revision.

I divided the Writing Tips into several thematic groups. The first cluster comprised general points about becoming professional wordsmiths, which I classified under the Delphic maxim, "Know Thyself." They included the following: Recognize your most creative time during the day, and use it, if possible; identify your personal style of writing; and acquire the tools of the trade, such as dictionaries, thesauruses, and grammar books. I brought into the classroom examples of excellent dictionaries and other reference material. I also recommended books about writing, such as Joseph M. Williams' classic, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (1990).

The second group of Writing Tips focused on errors that I have repeatedly encountered in students' writing. In my experience, one or two out of every 20 students suffer from each problem. I call these common problems "yuk-yuks" - they are basic grammatical mistakes or stylistic infelicities that cause your readers not to take you seriously. I began with simple ones, such as confusing "it's" and "its." Other yuk-yuks were overuse of the passive voice, wordy nominalizations, and incorrect comma placement. In this section, I typically distributed a handout describing the problem and suggesting methods of fixing it. The handouts were exercises I had devised or several pertinent pages from a grammar text.

A third group of Tips, which were scattered amongst the others, offered ways of recognizing and constructing solid arguments. I stressed to students that, as lawyers, their purpose in writing is to present cogent arguments. If they could distinguish between good and bad arguments, they would become better writers, too. These Writing Tips supported the substantive content of the course, which contained a large section on judicial reasoning in constitutional cases. I took examples of different types of arguments and fallacies from the course readings. Again, I distributed handouts, which highlighted components of arguments, and suggested books, such as Attacking Faulty Reasoning by T. Edward Damer (4th ed., 2000).

These Tips enhanced class discussion because students learned to identify fallacies and more readily suggested ways of strengthening arguments made by authors of the course materials. Moreover, as the weeks progressed, students became increasingly frustrated with vague, confusing, or convoluted arguments, and they complained about some authors' writing styles. Hence, the Tips also showed students the virtue of writing clearly, accurately, and precisely. Several students later told me that they found these Tips especially illuminating.

Midway through the term, students submitted their first paper. In assessing each paper, I noted particular problems with writing skills, referring the student to the relevant tip or attaching new handouts addressing the difficulties. For instance, one student's paper was stuffed with tandem subordination. My comments described the problem, and I gave the student an excerpt from a grammar book about ways of dealing with it.

Assessing papers in this manner augmented my knowledge of writing. I had to identify precisely a student's weakness, and I could not rely on general criticism about writing style, such as ubiquitous comments of "this paragraph is awkward," "reduce the passive voice," or the even bigger cop-out, "your writing style could be improved."

The fourth group of Writing Tips began after I had graded and returned the first assignments. These Tips used examples from the papers (without, of course, naming the students) to move beyond grammar and other obvious difficulties, such as overuse of the passive voice. They focused on more structural problems, such as building smooth and cogent paragraphs. Several Tips took between 15 and 20 minutes, but it was time well spent. Many of them reinforced my comments on the student papers, and they integrated the earlier Tips about legal reasoning, using examples from the course readings and student papers. Examples included writing topic sentences, handling counter-arguments, composing a compelling factual narrative, and connecting smoothly a group of paragraphs into a persuasive brief or essay.

When I received the second papers, I saw considerable improvement in many students' writing. Most papers began with a thesis paragraph, flowed more coherently, and contained concise conclusions. All of them had far fewer grammatical and stylistic glitches. Some students told me later that they had invested more time in the papers, incorporating my comments from their first papers and the Tips. Indeed, one student told me that when he wrote his second paper, he revised his first draft for the first time in his six years of university education and he now understood the tremendous benefit of revisions!

Overall, students reacted positively to the Writing Tip of the Day. The anonymous student evaluations, which were conducted midway through the term and again at the end, contained many positive comments about the Writing Tip. Students told me, both during office visits and after the end of the term, that they greatly appreciated this feature of the course. For instance, one month after the end of the term, a student said that she thought the Tips and feedback on her first paper had increased her marks in other courses by at least a full grade. Several students suggested adding Writing Tips of the Day to every seminar and theory course.

As a pedagogical technique, the Writing Tip of the Day has several advantages. First, it is inexpensive, without need of fancy equipment. Second, it is not time-consuming for long-time teachers, who can draw upon their experiences in finding examples and devising tips. Third, it motivates students to work hard on their assignments. When students prepared their first paper, they already knew the common errors that I had mentioned in the Tips, and they could avoid them. The second papers were noticeably better, as students had more Writing Tips and feedback from the first paper under their belt. Fourth, it increased attendance. Students did not want to miss the day's Writing Tip, if only to know what not to do in their papers.

I think this technique succeeded because the Writing Tips went beyond grammar and punctuation. They encompassed the essential subjects of constructing flowing paragraphs, developing convincing arguments, setting appropriate tones for particular audiences, and other substantive matters. Each one was not merely a Writing Tip - it was a thinking tip.