I just finished a recent book by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. If the names Levitt and Dubner sound familiar, it’s because you may have heard of their popular (and interesting) Freakonomics books (here and here). In the book I just finished, Think Like a Freak, Levitt and Dubner set out to teach readers how to “retrain [their] brain[s]” so that they, too, can “think like a freak.” The book defines what it means to “think like a freak” (it’s not a bad thing; it’s critical and curious thinking with a twist), and offers its step-by-step guide. But one chapter stuck out to me as particularly relevant to lawyers (and law students): How to Persuade People Who Don’t Want to Be Persuaded.

Now, the easy thought here is that this advice will apply to brief writing. And, yes, that’s true, but I think we can think of persuasion more broadly. Even a lawyer’s “objective” work has an element of persuasion to it. A demand letter must “persuade” its reader to comply; an internal office memo must “persuade” its reader that the analysis is the correct (or at least best) one.

So, what do Levitt and Dubner say?

First, we must “understand how hard persuasion will be—and why” (168).

I had a student a couple of years ago who described herself as a “one-sit wonder.” That is, in all of her previous schooling, she was quite adept at pounding out a more than serviceable paper in one sitting. Once she arrived in law school, she realized that style of writing was probably not going to work. (And, to be fair, it probably shouldn’t work in any other setting, either, but I do realize that it’s the way most students do write.)

There’s rarely anyone who can pound out what should be considered “final copy” in one sitting. Really good writers realize that writing is a process; the point of that first draft is to give you something to revise. In the writing process, you should be leaving behind a trail of drafts, some of them quite rough, before you finally arrive at the polished final copy.

Why is it important—no, necessary—to revise?