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- Making the transition from another field of expertise, such as engineering or history, to legal discourse.
- Approaching scholarly writing as a specific genre with defined scope, purpose, audience, substance, and technical concerns.
- Using legal substance to organize effectively.
- Improving legal writing by understanding it as a specific process performed under time pressure in both practical and academic legal settings.
- Using computer technology and word processing to improve legal research and writing.
- Connecting substance to syntax.
- Mastering English grammar.
- Paying proper attention to legal citation form and footnotes in text.
- Getting started; suggesting methods, strategies, and professional approaches to researching most effectively to achieve the best product.
- Overcoming writer's block; suggesting techniques for building a paper one part at a time, avoiding the clash of creativity with criticism, overcoming fear of the subject matter, or narrowing the scope of the project.
- Asking questions that focus the legal reader; making sure issues and thesis statements assist the reader; organizing logically; analyzing rather than describing the problem; using authority rather than writing around it; making an argument rather than reporting; synthesizing material, rather than listing it.
- Trimming excess; understanding what questions to ask in reviewing a product to make sure the product offers just enough information, and not too much, for its legal audience.
- Using rewriting techniques; becoming one's own best critic, viewing the product from a critical legal reader's eyes rather than solely from the writer's, making sure the paper achieves its purpose.
- Knowing the pitfalls and advantages of technology; using Computer Assisted Legal Research appropriately, using word processing programs appropriately for maximum effectiveness in drafting.
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