It’s the beginning of another academic year, and therefore it’s a good time to discuss the mechanics of writing and research. These are topics I cover briefly with students who take seminar classes from me, but I thought they might be useful to a broader audience. In a series of a few posts, I’m going to cover three topics about writing — organization, paragraphs, and persuasion — and one about research: hitting the books.

1. Organization

Lawyers, judges, clients — pretty much everyone who is not reading while sitting on a beach — are busy people. They have limited time. Very limited time. It’s crucial that you give them some sort of sense immediately (1) why you are writing to them, and (2) what your message is. This applies to memos, letters, briefs, complaints, law review articles, essay exams, letters to the editor, even (or most especially) emails. Business documents often do this with an “executive summary,” but most of the executive summaries I see are mealy-mouthed mush. Be clear and concise; time is most definitely not on your side. You do not want your reader to get to the second paragraph and be wondering, “Who is this idiot and what is he/she prattling on about?”

This means that you must get to the point immediately. A MEMO/BRIEF/EXAM IS NOT A MYSTERY NOVEL. You are not writing in a genre in which the reader is willing to be strung along, tantalized by sporadic clues, until all is revealed in the last paragraph. Briefs written like that fail to persuade. Papers written like that typically fail to contain any analysis. Memos written like that are impenetrable.

Instead, you want to reveal all up front, as quickly as you can. If you’re worried about the reader concluding that you are making unsupported assertions, you can flag your more complete explanation with phrases like “as explained further below.” But your ultimate conclusion must be disclosed right away. Think newspaper article, not mystery novel. (Although don’t write in the objective, descriptive style of most newspaper articles — see below. You will typically be doing advocacy or analysis, neither of which is mere description of the facts.) Your first paragraph of any document–brief, paper, letter, email–is the lede. Look at the lede paragraph of almost any newspaper article, and see how it tries to suck you in by giving you the basics of the story, leaving you wanting more in the way of detail. Here’s a random example from a recent New York Times article:

Hip Implant Complaints Surge, Even as the Dangers Are Studied

The federal government has received a surge in complaints in recent months about failed hip replacements, suggesting that serious problems persist with some types of artificial hips even as researchers scramble to evaluate the health dangers.

A brief or paper should start off the same way. Not only does this indicate to the reader where you are headed, so that he or she can establish a framework for understanding everything that follows, but perhaps more importantly, it indicates to you where you will be headed. Everything in the document should serve that initial statement of your thesis. This goes not only for the beginning of your document, but also the beginning of each section, the beginning of each subsection, on down to the first sentence of every paragraph. Each section should start off with a paragraph indicating what the argument or point of the section is. Each subsection should begin with a paragraph that indicates what that subsection will do. Each paragraph should begin with a sentence that states the point of the paragraph. Writing structure scales: at each scale, from paragraph to book, the structure looks similar.

Organized in this way, the entire document argues for the ultimate conclusion you are trying to get the reader to reach with you: that you are correct about whatever it is you said in the introduction. Here are some warning signs that you may instead be writing a mystery novel: an introduction that says that you will “discuss,” “review,” “examine,” or “consider” cases, statutes, or other legal developments. Unless you are writing a piece of legal journalism, try to avoid those words. You should not be discussing or examining anything, except as a short prelude to the main attraction: your thesis, which should be a declarative statement of a conclusion that you have reached about the material that you have read. Again, this goes for each section and subsection. Even if you need to explain what a court did or what a statute says to critique it or use it as support, that explanation should be done with an eye on the key features that support your argument.

Other warning signs that you are describing and not arguing or analyzing:

• You write a conclusion to a document or section that makes an argument that you have not made anywhere in the document previously. It’s endings like that that gave deus ex machina a bad name.
• You write a section or an exam answer that says, “Some courts have held X; but other courts have held Y,” and then ends.
• You write a page that cites the same source, over and over again, resulting in a string of “id.s,” and it is not the decision below or the central focus of your paper.

I’ll talk a bit about the basic unit of writing, the paragraph, in the next installment.