Expectations of what I teach
Recently, a tenured professor walked into my office, holding a student-written paper. The professor was teaching an advanced course in which students had to write a scholarly paper. "I'm very upset that our students can't write," he said. "Look at this. It's terrible."
The professor then pointed out some of the writing problems in the paper. Some were analytical and structural, but some were problems of grammar, punctuation, usage, and style.
My first unspoken reaction was that it is not my job to teach students the analytical and structural approach to writing scholarly papers. If the professor wants the scholarly papers to be written in a certain way, he should teach that way to his students. He cannot assume students already know how. All I teach is memos and briefs, which are not the same as scholarly papers.
My second unspoken reaction was that it is not my job to teach students grammar, punctuation, usage, and style. If the professor wants the scholarly papers to be well written from those perspectives, he should recommend a style manual, refer the student to the writing center, or work with the student individually to fix those problems. All I teach is memos and briefs.
Were my unspoken reactions wrong?
The subtext here is that many of the tenured faculty seem to believe that students should emerge from the first-year legal-writing course with a solid foundation in grammar, punctuation, usage, and style and a mastery of all forms of written legal analysis.
12 Comments:
RE: many of the tenured faculty seem to believe that students should emerge from the first-year legal-writing course with a solid foundation in grammar, punctuation, usage, and style . . . .
Methinks your students should have mastered grammar, punctuation, etc. before they entered your class, that college isn't the place to learn what was covered in middle school.
What are UT's standards for admission?
Thorne:
Devil's advocate:
You have commented on that/which mistakes in legal writing. Is that covered in middle school? It wasn't at mine. Was it at yours?
You have commented on hyphenating phrasal adjectives. Is that covered in middle school? It wasn't at mine. Was it at yours?
You have commented on poor use of passive voice. Is that covered in middle school? It wasn't at mine. Was it in yours?
You comment a lot about document design, layout, and type. Are those covered in middle school? They weren't at mine. Were they at yours?
My point:
Yes, some of the fine points my students get wrong were or should have been covered in middle school, but just as many were not.
Next point:
Law school admissions are based almost entirely on undergraduate GPA and LSAT score. Although students do submit an essay, it isn't used as a key component for admission. And even if it were, there are no restrictions on how it is prepared: polish it as much as you want; have your mom look at it; hire a professional to edit it. It can't tell you much about the applicant's real ability.
Topics like when to use which and when to use that, compound adjectives, and the difference between active and passive: certainly those were covered in the middle school I attended.
Page design and layout and type weren't covered in English class, but I took printing shop in 7th grade, and I worked on the school newspaper for the next two years.
Much of what we all learned in school is lost, because we don't use it very much; e.g., when was the last time you had to convert a temperature from Farenheit to Celsius?
Consider the following curriculum standards:
What high school-students in Texas are expected to know:
http://www.tea.state.tx.us/rules/tac/chapter110/ch110c.html
What high school-students in California are expected to know:
http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/enggrades9-10.asp
Seems to me that if a high school student is expected to know when to use which and when to use that, then a college freshman or a 1L should know that as well.
Unfortunately, so many 1Ls wouldn't be able to get a passing grade from my 8th-grade English teacher, and I think there's something wrong with that.
I don't think it's your job to teach grammar, punctuation, and basic usage; the students should have learned those skills before law school. (Heck, they should have learned them before college.) I can't speak for everyone, but I learned those skills, plus some basics of style (e.g. parallel construction) in high school.
Good writing takes years of education and practice. I've been at this legal-writing thing for 22 years, and I'm still learning.
Mister & Ray:
You probably both went to better middle schools than I did in rural Idaho in the 1970s. I owe my mom a lot; she is an English teacher, although she did not become one until I was 17. A lot of what I know is self-taught. And maybe I owe a little to an English teacher in college.
But I like Ray's point best. The ability to write at a high, professional level takes years of practice and training.
From lawyers, those who publish the stuff Thorne criticizes, we should expect better. From my students, I forgive a lot. They're learning a new language and mastering new substance, so I expect them to lose their way grammatically sometimes. And because the entering class here is pretty strong, only a few are really poor at the sentence level.
I think the tenured professor shares a misconception with many students and believes that all of legal writing is learned in a single year. Too often my students enter law school expecting to receive a set of rules that will allow them to execute perfect legal writing by the middle of the semester when they write their first memo of any length. By the end of the year, I hope that they have mastered some of the relevant rules (whether those be rules of grammar, style, or organization). But, more important to me is that they all understand that they must continue to improve throughout their lives. I tell them that it would be really sad if they peaked during their first year of law school and declined the rest of their lives.
Writing is a fundamental skill. Law schools should put much greater emphasis on this fundamental.
Those students who didn't develop good writing skills before they got to law school should take more than one or two legal writing courses.
At the least, they should demonstrate a mastery of grammar before they're awarded a law degree.
Writing is difficult. And if one wants to mature into a good writer, he or she owes years of education (formal or informal) and work. It seems strange to me that Mister Thorne thinks good-writing skills should be learned in middle school, yet Bryan Garner has made a career teaching experienced writers those same good-writing skills. Does that seem strange to anyone else? I suspect that the problem has less to do with an inadequate primary-school education, and more to do with the fact that good writers possess advanced skills that are beyond the limits of middle-school tutelage.
My answers to Wayne's questions: First, scholarly writing is as different from legal writing as it is different from creative writing or technical writing. It's absurd to think a legal-writing curriculum prepares students to excel at scholarly writing. Second, at a minimum the professor should state his or her standards clearly and provide references and instruction that will allow his or her students to satisfy that standard. If the professor is not doing that, he or she is partly at fault for the results.
RE: "It seems strange to me that Mister Thorne thinks good-writing skills should be learned in middle school . . . ."
Please read my comments again. I never said good writing skills should be learned in middle school.I've said no such thing.
What I said was that candidates for law school should already know that you don't hyphenate an adjective followed by a participal when the the two are used as a compound adjective.
If you haven't mastered grammar by the time you graduate high school, then something's wrong (either with you or the school).
MT,
You are of course correct, which goes to prove either that learning is a continuing process or that I continue to struggle against bad habits - probably both.
I have three family members that teach at graduate schools. All of them complain, much like you do, that students enter the programs without the ability to write well.
That's probably a common complaint. Perhaps the problem is that your standard - or my relatives' standards - are no longer the common standard. I suspect that most primary schools and colleges simply don't teach good writing. (Though, some schools are certainly betther than others.)
If most schools did teach good grammar and good composition, I doubt that the bad writing in magazines, newspapers, and books would be so common. So, in my mind, the question becomes this: What steps, if any, should professors take to improve their students' writing? Identifying a problem, but not offering a solution, is often not helpful. But the question of how much time a professor should spend teaching a collateral discipline presents a difficult cost-benefit analysis. I doubt individual professors have the time. Maybe the answer lies in forcing the faculty as a whole to adopt and teach the same standards?
Or, as Wayne's next post seems to ask, do enough people even care?
I've said this on more than one occassion: I'm glad I grew up when and where I did.
I've never attended a private school, and I believe no one (in the U.S.) should.
By 8th grade, I was expected to know how to fully diagram a sentence (subject, predicate, direct object, indirect object, independent clause, subordinate clause, subordinating conjunction, etc.). I might be called to the front of the class to identify a gerund or a participle, an expletive or a transitive verb. I might be ridiculed if I couldn't figure whether a pronoun should be 'which' or 'that.'
That was then. Things have changed.
Now, I see middle school students dressed for school as if they were going to plow a field. I sit on the bus and hear them casually say things that would have landed me in a woeful place. They seem to know more about American Idol than the First Amendment (just like their parents).
Things have certainly changed, and the more they change the happier I am about where and when I was educated. I would not want to be an 8th-grader attending public school today. No Way!
In the late 1970s, I was teaching mathematics at a public university. It was then that high school graduates began arriving at the university without enough education to take Math 101. The university conjured up courses like Math 078 to accommodate these students. I'm not sure, but I suppose the English department also conjured up courses like English 002.
The solution? That requires a good understanding of the underlying problems, and I doubt we (as a people, a phrase that sounds a mite alien these days) have either the gumption or the motivation to set things right.
I don't know. If I was teaching, say, history at a university and a student submitted an essay riddled with spelling errors and grammatical errors and such, I'd give it no higher grade than a C-- (unless, of course, it was brilliant).
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