DeanWuBlog

Writing

Other than doing the assigned reading and attending the class, the best means for improving performance not only in law school but also actual practice is to write. While oral advocacy is important and skill in that regard more readily apparent, it will be primarily written advocacy that forms the basis for formal evaluation.

Beyond Strunk & White, The Elements of Style, which I assume you already have read, I would recommend Francis-Noel Thomas & Mark Turner, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (1994) and the latest edition of Joseph M. Williams, Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. There is a passage from the former that I offer as a more philosophical introduction to the importance of “style:”

Writing proceeds from thinking. To achieve good prose styles, writers must work through intellectual issues, not merely acquire mechanical techniques. . . When style is considered the opposite of substance, it seems optional and incidental, even when it is admired. In this way of framing things, substantive thought and meaning can be prior to style and completely separable from it. . . Whether style is viewed as spiritual, fraudulent, or something-in-between, any concept of style that treats it as optional is inadequate not only to writing but to any human action. Nothing we do can be done “simply” and in no style, because style is something inherent to action, not something added to it. In this respect, style is like the typeface in which a text is printed. We may overlook it, and frequently do, but it is always there.