Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Session 4, 2:30-3:15pm
Illustrated Instruction: Using Images to Help Teach Basic Organizational Structures of Legal Writing
Craig T. Smith
Program Code: W4G
Legal writing instruction tends to rely heavily on words. Words, however, sometimes fail. To a first-year law student and novice legal writer, the language of legal analysis, rhetoric, and instruction can seem foreign. Moreover, particularly for students whose primary learning style is not verbal, words may remain too abstract to help the students comprehend quickly.
Words are not, fortunately, our only tools. Cognitive psychologists have explained that we can foster learning through representational redescription: presentation of ideas in various, mutually reinforcing forms. One promising form, particularly for students whose primary learning style is visual, is imagery.
Imagery holds promise especially for teaching basic organizational patterns of legal writing. Instructional literature offers helpful descriptions of the processes by which one can generate legal documents. In particular, legal writing texts have described ways to recognize and use organizational structures that routinely underlie written legal analysis and advocacy. Most texts, however, offer advice primarily in textual form, including sample writings and mnemonic acronyms (IRAC, etc.). They rarely engage in representational redescription using imagery.
My poster seeks to foster the development of instructional imagery. It tries to suggest how such imagery, linked to analogies and briefly explained by text, might help novice legal writers visualize, understand, and learn to use typical organizational structures of legal writing.