Students in the first-year legal writing courses are right now handing in their first full length memos. Learning this new memo writing skill is usually a moment of some anxiety for students, as the analysis, form, and structure of a legal memo is quite different from other types of writing.

The most important word in the previous paragraph is the word skill. Legal writing is a skill, and as a skill, it can be developed through hours of deep practice, according to The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle.

The Talent Code starts with the question of how and why some environments, whether they are formal coaching programs or even informal family dynamics, produce people with exceptional skill sets.

This past weekend our legal writing faculty attended the 7th Biennial Central States Legal Writing Conference in Chicago. The theme of this year’s conference was “Practice-Ready”: Preparing Students and Assessing Progress. In keeping with this practice-oriented theme, our legal writing faculty presented on three topics: using live critique feedback on student drafts, crafting persuasive word choice through attention to text, subtext, and context, and developing an argument for a new rule of law in an appellate brief.