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LBW Quote of the Day: The Challenge of Teaching (and Learning) Good Legal Writing

By Bruce Carton

I liked this quote I ran across today at the Legal Writing Prof Blog. Having taught (and taken) several legal writing courses, I think it is pretty accurate. ?Teaching legal writing is like dropping someone in the middle of China and telling them to learn Chinese, and, by the way, no one around you is speaking it correctly.?- Terri Pollman I recall going off to law school as a what I believed to be a decent writer. After reading 1,000 cases as a first year law student -- most of which were written in the stuffiest, densest legalese imaginable -- my writing started to morph into what I was seeing everyday: passive voice, unnecessary Latin phrases, way-too-long sentences, etc. It took an intervention in the form of a really good legal writing course to get me writing like a real person again.

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on July 30, 2010 (boomark / email).