Posted by Writing Specialist
Blog
09/30/2010 at 11:41 AM
On Monday, September 27, 2010, the Senate passed legislation requiring the federal government to use clear language in public documents and to eliminate confusing jargon. Senators Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, and George Voinovich, R-Ohio, sponsored the 2010 Plain Writing Act. See an article about this Act here.
Posted by Writing Specialist
Blog
09/29/2010 at 01:58 PM
If You Ask Your Attorney To Be Concise by Seth Abramson, Esq.
When he speaks, it will not be to describe those neighbors you were born to,whose boys like grim ferrets poked their heads out the weedsand stole caps from your juiced Honda; because he knows you loved life in the neighborhood / and may even have loved sending
your furtive retrievers, like warhorses, out to battle with the locals, and did treat them well - your retrievers - once they'd plunged down hillsides with red tongues and upturned noses, doing so only because you'd asked them to, and...
Posted by Writing Specialist
Blog
09/16/2010 at 05:05 PM
"Writing" Down the House
"The scene that scares you the most, that you don't want to write because it's the most difficult to write--that's the one you have to write. So I think when people have writer's block, it's because what they have to write scares them. And that's usually the heart of the book."
--Marcy Dermansky
Replace "scene" in this quote with "legal methods paper" or "seminar paper" and author Marcy Dermansky could be talking about law school writing. Writing is often scary. This fear results from many things: being beat up by the red pen in grade school, having low...
Posted by Writing Specialist
Blog
09/10/2010 at 12:57 PM
"Writing" Down the House
This interesting article, "10 Tips on How to Write Less Badly," from The Chronicle of Higher Education may be addressed to academics but could just as easily apply to lawyers/law students. Enjoy.
Posted by Writing Specialist
Blog
09/02/2010 at 02:39 PM
"Writing" Down the House
Michele Norris of NPR recently interviewed novelist Richard North Patterson. Before becoming a published novelist, he had been a lawyer. When asked, by Norris, why so many lawyers become writers, Mr. Patterson responded, in part, that lawyers arrange messy facts into pleasing narratives. He stressed that lawyers must write clearly and concisely. Ms. Norris pushed back by suggesting that legal writing doesn’t resemble English. In response, Mr. Patterson said that such writing is "bad legal writing." Your Legal Methods professors will love hearing that. ...
Posted by Writing Specialist
Blog
09/01/2010 at 10:21 AM
"Writing" Down the House
How about a little mid-week poetry to shake up your neurons? I wrote this poem in April for a contest sponsored by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The prompt was to write a poem based on/in response to/or just tangentially related to a poem by John Keats called "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer."
Hip Hop Homer:
After Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
Yo, yo Homer. He’s a freakin’ home boy.
Never done much trippin’.
‘Cept when he was sippin’ MaiTais at the local.
Still, he ain’t no yokel.
Bounces in the realms of gold.
Shit. ...
