Mastering the Law School Exam by Suzanne Darrow-Kleinhaus

Author:Suzanne Darrow-Kleinhaus
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781634592253
Publisher: West Academic Publishing
Published: 2023-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

C.IS THE PROBLEM THE WAY YOU WRITE?

The answer to this question is very likely “no.” The problem is not your writing, or what you really mean, your style of writing. Still, my experience in working with students is that you tend to think it is.

For example, let’s consider what this student had to say on her own behalf. What strikes me, and should strike you, is that she minimized the importance of leaving “stuff” out of her answer in favor of finding fault with her writing. Of course, the “stuff” we’re referring to is the law and legal analysis—the essence of any answer.

Instead, the student identifies writing as the weakness and dismisses the real problems with conclusory statements and insufficient and incomplete statements of the law. While to the novice this seems to be a writing problem, it’s not. It’s a legal analysis problem and an overall failure to engage in an IRAC-based analysis. But before we target these specific deficiencies, let’s discuss the rather widely-held belief that “the problem is my writing.”

There’s good news and there’s bad news when it comes to the writing issue. The good news is that most of you don’t have a problem with basic writing skills. Consequently, when a professor makes the comment on your exam that “you have a problem with writing,” it’s not likely to be referring to matters of subject-verb agreement, displaced modifiers, or too many commas (while grammar problems are definitely something you need to work on and improve, in general these are not the problems which seriously detract from your grade), but rather, it concerns the substance of what you’re saying and the structure in which you are saying it.

Therefore, the comment

“The problem is your writing”

more likely translates to

“Your analysis is disorganized”

or possibly

“Your discussion lacks substance”

or maybe even

145

“Your argument lacks focus”

As you can see, these comments go well beyond the mechanics of writing to the structure and content of what you’ve written. And here’s the bad news—this is far more serious than grammar problems and requires a great deal more work. But first it requires that you give it the recognition it deserves.

Back to the good news—you can correct these deficiencies once you realize that they can’t be dismissed as “writing problems.” I have no doubt that you’d much rather have learned that the problem was simply a matter of punctuation—of knowing where to put the commas and such—but it’s not. Rather, it’s a matter of how you’re thinking about the problem and how you’re putting it down on paper. All of which pretty much brings us full circle to where we began our analysis of the second hypothetical—where your answer is disorganized. Frequently, organizational problems masquerade as writing problems and are easily mis-diagnosed.

Once again, consider what happens when your answer is disorganized. As we’ve seen, there may be any one or a mix of the following: identifying one issue but discussing the rules for another, lumping all the issues in the problem together in one paragraph and then

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