Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Plain English and legal writing: Comparing expert and novice writers by…
Plain English and legal writing: Comparing expert and novice writers
by Hartig and Lu (2014)
Aim
to dissect the differences of the expert and novice legal writers in using grammar in their legal writings
Problems
increased number of international students in Law Schools in the US
underresearched lawyering skills
Few or no research-based linguistic analysis of legal texts and language
Materials
the expert corpora
10 samples from published legal memoranda
3 samples from legal writing textbooks
5 samples from law school writing websites
2 samples from the legal websites (The National Legal Research Group - www.nlrg.com and the Association of Legal Writing Directors - www.alwd.org)
the novice corpus
LLM student writings
13 low-rated student memos
13 high-rated student memos
Research methods
chi-square
rubric
usage and style
clarity
proper legal phrasing
proper grammar
mechanics
proper capitalization
proper punctuation
adequate proofreading
The Standard Part-of-Speech (POS) Tagger
the Morpha lemmatization tool
Results&discussion
Quantitative analysis
the high novice and low novice groups produced more sentences in passive voice and nominalizations than the expert, but no differences seen between the high novice and low novice groups
a dilemma for legal language pedagogy: need for focus on the surface-level features of legal writing
mixed methods analysis
passives
nominalizations