To: CLS Seminar Paper Participants
From: Nicholas Johnson
Re: Seminar Papers Procedure and Deadlines
Scan this memo now. Return to it later. Some of it involves things that should have been done last week. Other items refer to future conferences, or the very last things you’ll do with your finished paper.
Some of you have already selected topics and begun research. Others have yet to do so.
Because we have many steps to go through, a limited time in which to execute them, and more writers than usual, some timelines and agreements are necessary on the front end.
(Among my purposes in doing so are at least two that benefit you. (1) To leave you free of obligations, at least so far as this seminar is concerned, the last week of the semester, thereby giving you more time to study for finals, or finish up other assignments. (2) To give you every opportunity to do your very best work on a paper that will be posted on the Web for all to see.)An obvious first step is to confirm, with the main office and with me, that your expectations regarding writing and academic credits accords with our records. If you have not already done so, let me know by the end of this week at the latest how many academic and writing credits you think you will get.
Deadlines, once established, will be rigorously enforced (that is, failure to meet them will carry points-off penalties). Moreover, rather than have just one, it is useful for both you and I to have a number of "mileposts" (as we say in "GANTT" and "PERT" chart project management language). What follows are my proposals for now. I am willing to modify them – if the group of everyone who is writing can agree unanimously on how the mileposts should be changed (and do so sufficiently prior to the milepost in question).
After getting the administrative details out of the way, the next step is to pick a topic. Here are some suggestions about how to go about that.
Categories, topics and narrowing: in general.
What follows is designed to give you a heads up on what we’ll be doing during our research paper one-on-one conferences.
1. I won’t assign conference times. It’s up to you to reserve the available time that best suits your convenience. Ms. Sharlee Feller, Room 433, will have a schedule of available times (as will I). As always, earlier is better than later; I can’t see everyone on Fridays.
Here’s some idea of my default schedule and available times. Half-hour time slots Monday, Tuesday and Thursday: 9:00, 9:30, 10:00, 10:30, 11:00, 1:00 and 1:30. Those are enough to cover everyone. We will save slots on Fridays for genuine emergencies.
I work with an assistant out of another office 3:00 to 5:00 each day, have late-night school board meetings most Tuesday evenings, our class Wednesday evenings, and a range of additional university, law school, school board, and other obligations that sometimes cut into the times above. The only out-of-town travel of which I am now aware is the week of January 31, mentioned above.
However, if you really can’t make any of the times indicated, and want to arrange another time I will, of course, make every effort to try to accommodate you. My first preference, if an additional group of times is necessary, would be Wednesday mornings at 9:00, 9:30, 10:00 and 10:30.
2. What I will do with your “first final drafts” is, in part, a function of what you have done with them. For example, some of you will be closer to a final draft than others. I tend to give relatively less detailed editing attention to drafts that are either (a) so nearly letter perfect as to not require it (I’ve yet to see one in 40 years of teaching), or (b) so tentative that any work I put in on it is unlikely to be used by you.
3. One of the purposes of running the outlines by me early is to get me locked in on your paper’s basic focus, topic, and organization. You will be grateful to know that seems to have worked. So, with rare exception, we won’t, subsequently, be talking about those important features of your papers.
4. Levels and purposes of revision.
(a) There is a minimal amount of rewriting required of you for a “writing credit” and academic credit for a seminar (see the current Student Handbook for details). That means a “second draft.” That’s all you are required to do for this course.5. Legal research and writing; what I’ll be looking for; grades.(b) Beyond that, however, there is (1) your personal pride in the quality of your work, especially (2) work that will be posted on the Web for all to see, and (3) the impact on your grade of an improved “final, final draft.”
(c) Finally, you are entering a profession of wordsmiths. There is little lawyers do that is not reading, listening, writing or talking. How well you do professionally (e.g., win-loss record, recognition, advancement, income) and, more important, how much pleasure you get out of it, will be overwhelmingly determined by how much comfort and skill you have as a wordsmith.
That means practice and coaching. I am happy to work with you in that way – up to the reasonable limits imposed on both of us by our other obligations in life. Choosing to do this will affect your grade only minimally, if at all. It’s not worth your time for that reason. I’m not required to offer; you’re not required to accept. I just offer this pro bono service as a friend to any of you who want to put in additional time.
During the course of your career you may be called upon to write op-ed columns for the newspaper, advertising copy, business plans, news releases, and a variety of other non-legal documents. You may choose on your own to write short stories or poetry. All are useful skills to have.
But what we’re emphasizing in this seminar paper assignment (for those of you who are law students) is a display of your ability to do legal research and writing. And the more of it you show me the more substantive your paper and the better your grade.
So, what am I looking for? Such of the following as are appropriate to your paper.
And then there’s the matter of innovation, creativity and substantive contribution. This is the whipped cream topping. Not every topic lends itself. But I’m obviously going to be impressed with genuinely creative approaches to law and policy that have the potential of making a unique contribution to the literature (and practice) of the law.
A certain amount of “journalism” is required. You need a topic sentence (“lead”) and an introduction to set the stage and explain the purpose of your paper. You need to describe the nature and general significance of the problem or issue you’re addressing. You may want to say a little something about the operation of the Internet (beyond a simple dropped endnote to the ACLU v. Reno findings of fact). That’s not only OK, it’s necessary.
But the primary thing I’ll be looking for, in a law school writing seminar, will be your demonstration of legal skills.
6. Content and clarity. When less is more; when more is more. Lean writing. It’s a rare piece of writing (whether journalism, court opinion – or this memo) that can’t be improved by removing excess words. Your writing is no exception.
On the other hand, it’s also a rare piece of writing that doesn’t reflect the author’s assumptions about what “everybody knows.” Sometimes it’s a matter of a referent not being clear (e.g., “that,” “their,” “its”). Sometimes it’s the use of a word or concept that needs a definition, or example. (This can be provided in an additional paragraph, sentence, parenthetical clause, footnote, or appendix.)
7. Proof reading, attention to detail. Reread, in my Web-posted piece called “So You Want to be a Lawyer,” about the senior partners who have, literally, thrown writing back at associates because of a simple typo. I want to help you help yourself prevent this ever happening to you. Law firms don’t hire law school graduates for the thrill of editing the new hires’ work product. The partners think you are there because you can write better than they can. They assume it is you who will be editing, and improving, their writing rather than the other way around. Your success turns on your proving their assumption correct.
It is not at all uncommon for a good writer to put any piece of writing through ten or more rewrites. It’s highly unlikely that even one percent of the students coming through this law school will ever be able to dash off first drafts of beautiful, polished prose.
You need to read, and reread, and reread again. Read for sentences that are too long. Read again for agreement of tense and number. (For example, a corporation is an “it” not a “they.”) Read again, aloud, for cadence. Constantly ask yourself about every word and phrase: “Are there other ways of saying this? What are they? Would any make the idea easier to grasp, the writing more interesting to read?” Read for clarity (“Do I need an example, illustration, citation of authority, or a restatement of this proposition?”) Read for grammar, spelling (“spell checkers” aren’t enough), and citation form. Then read it again, considering it as a whole.
Think of yourself as a sculptor, or potter – an artist whose medium is words rather than marble or clay. Put a little more here; scrape some off there. Start over. Hard work? Yeah, I guess so. But it’s also fun, creative, and satisfying if you pay attention to what you’re doing. Take some delight from each creative tweak of phrase instead of just struggling through it as fast as you can. It will pay you dividends many times over during the next fifty years.
8. During our conferences we will talk about the aspects of your paper discussed above. Have you done an adequate amount of legal research and demonstration of legal skills? Does the progression of your analysis need an additional paragraph or section?
But much of what we’ll talk about is your writing. During this discussion please bear these things in mind.
(a) I like you. My comments about, and editing on, your paper does not represent a judgment about you. They indicate that I care about you and want to be helpful. Take them in that spirit.9. What’s next? What I will do is to (a) read your paper carefully, and (b) provide fairly detailed editing on the first few pages (usually five or ten).(b) Nor are they merely my prior justification for the really awful grade that you are going to get in this seminar. Nobody is going to get an awful grade – and especially not you. K-12 testers make a distinction between “assessment” (useful for coaches) and “evaluation” (used for “grading”). We are engaged in assessment, not evaluation. It’s helpful for you to make clear to me what you were trying to say. It’s neither necessary nor helpful to fall into the mode of trying to “defend,” like the good lawyer you are becoming, your every choice of word and punctuation.
(c) Especially is it not the case that my editorial suggestions represent the “correct” way to write, and that your choice of words is “wrong” (with some obvious exceptions). My suggestions are just that, suggestions. They are an effort to get you to confront the realization that there really are a lot of alternative ways to say something, and to get you into the habit of thinking up and trying those alternatives, rather than just leaving on paper the first expression that comes to mind.
Why have I not tightly edited the entire paper? Because that is a part of what you are to do as your rewrite. Why have I done as much as I have? Because I want to give you enough examples of what I’m looking for that you can extrapolate from them to the rest of your paper.
So, after our conference what you are to do is reread your paper carefully with my suggestions in mind. Giving it that degree of care, and looking for those kinds of things, what do you see that can be improved? Then, as stand-up comic Lewis Black says, “Fix it.”
How much you will need to fix to meet the minimal rewrite standard will depend on how much needs fixing. How much you want to fix beyond that, for the reasons listed above, is up to you.
If your paper is in relatively good shape, you may be required to fix all of it. Why? Because there isn’t that much to fix and it won’t take you very long.
If you need relatively more help with your writing, you need to learn and practice some editing skills, and there is a lot of fixing to do, we may select a few pages of your paper for you to practice on. You will rewrite, and rewrite, those pages until they are close to perfect – in addition to whatever overall changes the paper may require.
10. What do I mean by a “first final draft”? It is a draft that represents your very best work. There is nothing more that you see you could do to improve it. You would be willing to show it to a future potential employer.
Anyone who gives me a paper that may require additional research, endnotes, conclusions or other entire sections, as well as substantial editing, risks being treated as not having met the deadline. At a minimum I will probably withhold thorough editing until you provide me what really represents, in fact, your final, best effort at a “first final draft.” (This is not because I am mean spirited by nature. It is because there is little point for either of us to my putting in hours of editing on text you’re not going to use anyway.)
In fairness to the more timely participants, grades on delayed first final drafts (once submitted) will necessarily, to some degree, be discounted for the added time the authors had to complete this stage. However, such delays will neither short circuit the process nor extend the deadline for the final, final draft. (a) Once you have submitted to me a completed first final draft I will still need to edit it. (b) We will, thereafter, still need to have an additional conference about it, and (c) you will still need to prepare and submit a final, final draft by the stated deadline.
11. Final, final drafts. Following our conference on your first final draft, the last stage is for you to give me, both in HTML on a floppy disk, and in hard copy, your final, final draft. Bear in mind that this will be uploaded to our Web site where you can refer potential employers to it as a writing sample and impress your friends with your published work.
[Notes: (a) If you do not now have your own personal Web page, and choose to use this course as an opportunity to create one, your paper will be a link from that page. Creating a Web page is not a requirement (nor source of extra credit) for this seminar. If you do not have a Web page, I will post your paper as a link from our class page. That is a requirement for this seminar.(b) You do not need to be able to upload a document to the Web. I will do that for you (or help you do it if you want to learn how). The primary obligation you have in this regard is to get me a floppy disk version of your paper that can be transformed (by me) into a Web-usable (HTML) format.
(c) Many word processing programs’ document files, whether “inserts” or copy-and-paste into HTML, end up stripping out the endnote calls and endnotes. So if you are not going to give me an HTML file, ready to upload, please follow this procedure:
(1) Use whatever word processing software you prefer. It makes it lots easier to have the program automatically renumber endnotes when you move text around.
(2) Once you have your final, final draft in the form you want, print it out.
(3) Save the file you were working on both on the hard drive and on a backup floppy.
(4) Call up the file again and save it with a different name – but this time use the “save as” command to save it as a “text” (sometimes called ASCCI, ANSI, or DOS) format.
(5) Call up the “.txt” file and see if the endnote calls, and endnotes, are there. If not, insert them manually. (You can usually capture all the endnotes at once from your main document in a block-copy-and-paste move and put them into the “.txt” file.)
(6) Save the “.txt” file on your hard drive and back up floppy.
(7) Make another floppy for me with the word processing file and the “.txt” file on it.
(8) If you are using a Mac, make sure the floppy you give me, and its file, can be read by an IBM-compatible computer.]