Just a Quick Question

By Deborah Hecht, Ph.D.

Do you have a minute? This is just a quick question!

I'm in my office, reviewing materials for my upcoming Continuing Legal Education presentation on how lawyers can write and sell essays to a general audience. A student pauses at the office door. She has never come to The Writing Resources Center before; we have never worked together. "Do you have a minute? This is just a quick question," she says.

There may be quick questions, but there are few quick answers. Indeed, I’ve become convinced that taking the time to work within a context is the key to offering meaningful help to students.

However, the student doesn't want to come into the office; she doesn't want to sit down. She's a top student who doesn't believe that she needs help with writing. All she needs is the answer to her quick question: when is it necessary to capitalize the word "court" and--if it isn't too much trouble--could I explain the rules of capitalization for her.

In the beginning, when The Writing Resources Center first opened and I was new to the law school, I accepted quick questions as a challenge. Almost every time I walked down the hall, students and colleagues would stop me. Most of their questions were about the rules of grammar: could I please give them the rule for how to pluralize a proper name that ends in an 's'. Could I please provide a relevant comma rule and demonstrate its application in one minute or less?

The emphasis on learning the rules of grammar puzzled me at first. As a writer and writing specialist, I emphasize that law students must learn a variety of strategies for achieving clear and concise professional-level writing skills. The mechanics (grammar, spelling, and punctuation) are integral to clear legal writing--but law students who want to become good writers and effective communicators must learn far more than the rules.

I was in session with a first year student when it occurred to me: law students are trained to IRAC. As a colleague noted, law students are rule-oriented and rule burdened; rules are essential to their professional performance. Perhaps some students believed that knowing the rules of grammar would make them effective legal writers. I wondered how to satisfy the students' need for rules while also teaching them other skills including how to self-edit and how to revise their work.

My response to the next student who asked for "the comma rules" was to insist on seeing the way she used commas in her legal writing. "Show me one of your already graded papers; let's see how you're using commas."

The student was resistant: she'd already earned an MBA and until she came to law school no one had ever criticized her writing skills. However, when she brought in an already graded paper from her Legal Methods class, I noted that commas were a relatively minor issue. This student needed to review the fine points of sentence structure, word choice, and parallelism as well.

Context was the key to offering this student the kind of assistance that would last long after she passed her bar exam.

My insistence on answering questions within the context of a completed, graded paper brought students into the Writing Resources Center--and when students came to work with me on a regular basis, their written work began to show real improvement.

The above-mentioned MBA student sent me a note: "Last semester I was lucky to get a C+ on my writing assignments; now I just earned my first A!" Another student set a different goal for herself: she worked with me on polishing her already good writing to a more professional level. Last week, she won a fellowship. She came to the Writing Resources Center to report that in addition to winning the fellowship, she'd received comments on the excellence of her writing.

In addition to specific writing issues, I've noticed that working within the context of students’ already-graded assignments and exams indicates that some students need help with their reading skills. These students misread a written assignment or misread the written instructions on an exam. This kind of misreading is evident to me only when I see the actual assignment or exam.

When misreading is part of the problem, I tell students: "We're going to practice the art of staying text-specific."

To keep students text-specific, my ongoing question is: Where did you get this information?

The answer is too-often a vague one: "It was somewhere in the problem my Legal Methods instructor gave us." And that's when I say to the student, "Help me out here--point to the place on the page itself where you read this."

Once again, context becomes the key to helping students.

My office itself provides yet another kind of context. This is where students and colleagues can see how I work. When we sit together in The Writing Resources Center, books and journals and my own writing-in-process surround us. There are texts on legal writing and research, books on word usage, several different kinds of dictionaries, and a selection of magazines devoted to the art and the craft of writing. Students learn that no one--not even the "writing specialist"--has all the answers memorized.

The students who work with me learn that I have my own writing issues; they learn that I rely on a variety of texts to help me; they see me explore those texts when I need help. They see that there may be quick questions—but they also learn that quick answers rarely work.

The other day I stood outside a colleague's office. She is a professor whose writing I admire. In addition, she is an excellent editor. I wanted her opinion on this essay, but I was reluctant to bother her. Despite my feelings of hesitancy, I knocked at her office door. She looked up and gave me a smile.

"Do you have a minute?" I said. "This is just a quick question."