Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
"Plain English and legal writing" Alissa Hartig and Xiaofei Lu…
"Plain English and legal writing" Alissa Hartig and Xiaofei Lu (2014)
Materials and Methods
13 low-rated students' and 13 high-rated students' memos were compared according to:
During a weekly period they were given certain feedbacks according to their writing without any guidelines
10 published sample memoranda
3 from legal writing textbooks
5 from law school writing wesites
2 from legal organizations' websites
Approach
Students were asked to write three interoffice legal memoranda analyzing three separate client problems.
All students were international and some of them experienced law in Englsih language while some no.
No student were told to use certain way of writing
Why were ther a demand for the project :!?:
The number of programs available to foreign law graduates increased by 50%
The number of
international students in such programs rose by 130%
54% increase in the number of foreign-educated lawyers
Lawyering skills were quite underresearched
The publication of "Language of the law" by Mellinkoff (1963) and the movement for "Plain English" resulted several changes,
National legislation;
Novice legal writes
Governmnet language
Plain Writing Act 2010
Three main articles were used in a law environment
Bryan Garner’s (2001) Legal writing in Plain English
Mellinkoff (1963)
Richard C. Wydick "Plain
English for lawyers" (2005)
The blurred line between Academic and Profeccional English made it important to determine it for students before they read learn anything.
Insufficient material for L2 lawyers
They used to use discource analysis and corpus tools.
Judges and law students needed to be taught Plain English to 'legalese'
There were some problematic areas in the sphere of law
The passive voice -which is an important feature in written university registers.
Plays an important role in legal writing in terms of reasons of clarity, stylistics, and rhetoric.
Nominalizations - associated with proficiency in English academic writing
‘‘Elegant variation’’
Noun chains
Analysis
Several approaches were used to analyze the data
tense/ nouning/ the usage and structure of passive/ punctuation/ capitalization/ the usage of 'be' were paid more attention
The usage of 'passive voice' was in teh center of topic
There were certain verbs that came in the form of 'passive' frequently
convict; sell; intend; infer; charge; make; consider; use; entitle; arm were the main 10 verbs
Conclusions
The students who scored well on the memorandum may benefit from direct instruction in alternative strategies for foregrounding their analysis in order to minimize the use of the passive voice and better approximate expert discourse.
For the lower-rated students, however, it may be more important to focus on meaning control than on Plain English features, particularly since these surface features do not differentiate them from their higher-scoring peers.
As for the novice corpus, it would also be useful to collect writing data from U.S. J.D. students, particularly L1 English students, to observe whether or not their writing exhibits similar tendencies to those found in the L2 English novice corpus.
There should be a lot more research in the same sphere in future.
Given that most professional legal writing textbooks currently available are written for J.D. students, such a study could be useful for tailoring future legal writing
pedagogy to the specific needs of international LL.M. students.