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Nowak, A L --- "Tough love: the law school that required its students to learn good grammar" [2013] LegEdDig 12; (2013) 21(1) Legal Education Digest 44


Tough love: the law school that required its students to learn good grammar

A L Nowak

Touro Law Review, Vol 28, 2012, pp 1369-1392

Law professors across the country frequently complain that their students lack basic writing skills – grammar, punctuation, capitalisation, and syntax.

Many of us began our law school teaching jobs with no knowledge that this problem existed, let alone how pervasive it was.

Some legal writing professors have tried innovative and creative methods of incorporating remedial writing instruction into the legal writing classroom. These techniques, although helpful, are limited in scope due to the time constraint of the legal writing syllabus. Additionally, not all professors incorporate these techniques into their curricula.

This issue should be of particular concern to legal educators because much of what law school graduates do involves writing. Lawyers draft many different types of documents including contracts, motions, pleadings, briefs, advisory letters to clients, legislation, and judicial decisions. If these documents are not artfully drafted and, therefore, are ambiguous because of deficiencies in basic writing skills, clients can suffer and litigation can ensue.

Occasionally, dire consequences can result from a lawyer’s lack of basic writing skills. State courts have cited poor grammar as one of the grounds for suspending and sanctioning lawyers. Courts also have reprimanded lawyers publicly for creating documents with numerous misspellings.

Given the importance of basic writing skills in the practice of law, it seems prudent that law schools should acknowledge the pervasiveness of their students’ writing deficiencies and attempt to remediate the problem on an institutional level rather than on a catch-as-catch-can basis by individual legal writing professors.

In March 2010, Touro Law Center, following its reputation as an educational innovator, did just that. At the request of the director of the law school’s Writing Center, the faculty voted to adopt an innovative program designed to ensure that all graduates would possess a minimum level of basic writing skills. Under this program, which was implemented in August 2011, all incoming students are required to pass a basic writing skills test as a condition of graduation. The Writing Center administers the test to all first-year students during orientation. Those who do not pass are required to enrol in a semester-long Writing Skills Workshop. The Writing Center administers a retest at the end of the semester.

In August 2010, prior to beginning the program, Touro’s Writing Center administered a different type of diagnostic writing skills test – not for placement but merely to determine the level of writing skills of that year’s incoming students. The results of this test confirmed the anecdotal experience of faculty members – that many law students are extremely deficient in basic writing skills.

Two hundred and thirty first-year law students took the writing skills test in August 2010. It consisted of three parts. Part A required students to correct errors in grammar, punctuation, capitalisation, and syntax in fifteen sentences. Part B required students to fill in the blanks in five sentences by choosing between two words. (Example: ‘principal’ or ‘principle.’) Part C required students to write a persuasive essay. The results confirmed the faculty members’ findings from reading their students’ papers and exams.

In order to reduce the time constraints caused by an additional class-attendance requirement, I decided to teach a large part of the writing skills workshop online.

There are no online classes at Touro Law Center, so I did not have an in-house model to follow. For this reason, and because the program would not begin until August 2011, I decided to beta test the online portion of the workshop during the Spring 2011 semester.

I chose 60 students on the basis of their performance on the diagnostic test earlier that year and invited them by email to become members of the ‘Research and Development Team for the Beta Test of Touro’s Innovative Online Writing Workshop’. I said that I would accept the first 20 students who agreed to participate, and I told them that if they participated in at least 90 per cent of the online class assignments and discussions, they could list the team membership on their resumes. Within 48 hours, I had 20 acceptances (and a waiting list).

Stephanie Juliano – the Assistant Director of the Writing Center – and I met with the students for an initial one-hour session in the school, during which we explained the beta test and administered a 20-question multiple choice exam. We administered a similar exam during a one-hour wrap up session in the school at the end of the semester. In between, we conducted all classes online and used written class discussions as the vehicle for students to practice and demonstrate their mastery of the class lessons.

I used a Blackboard platform for the classes, which I obtained for free through LexisNexis.

What made Touro’s workshop innovative was that I used discussions about professionalism and responsible choice-making as a vehicle for teaching basic writing skills. I chose professionalism and responsible choice-making as topics after discussions with practising lawyers about what they wished they had learned in law school.

Each Sunday, I posted two things in the online classroom. The first was a short story about something that happened to me during my 19 years of law practice before I joined the Touro faculty. The second was a short lesson about basic sentence construction (commas, semicolons, subject-verb agreement, etc.). In each story, the lawyer was forced to make difficult choices between doing what was right and doing what was easy. I explained that sometimes it was hard to know what was right and that these situations did not always involve clear-cut ethical dilemmas. In the online workshop, the students were required to discuss how they would have handled the situation if they had been the lawyer, what they would have been thinking, and what the ‘down side’ would have been for the choice(s) that they made.

I required the students to post responses of at least 150 words in the online classroom. I also required each student to post a 120-word reply to each of two classmates’ responses. The purpose of the replies was to generate in-depth thought and additional discussion.

Further, I required the students to incorporate the week’s writing lesson into each of their posts. For example, one week’s lesson was about different methods of using commas and required students to use commas in four specific ways in each post. If a student made a mistake with the writing skills, either Stephanie Juliano or I wrote a private email to the student to offer more help. We also occasionally jumped into the class discussion to facilitate it – usually by asking questions designed to make the students think more deeply about how they might handle the situation and why.

At first the students were guarded in their responses. But, after two weeks, the students began to thrive in the online classroom. They were very respectful of each other’s responses, even if they disagreed. It was clear that they enjoyed brainstorming about what they would have done in these professional situations. Not only were they learning basic writing skills from the lessons and practice, but they were learning from each other to think deeply about the ramifications of decision-making in professional practice.

Lessons in the online workshop focused on the necessary components of basic writing –grammar, punctuation, capitalisation, and syntax. My explanations generally were unconventional and phrased in a friendly and easily-accessible style that was designed to engage the students rather than bore them.

The program proved to be popular among the students. Seventeen of the initial 20 students worked hard enough and completed enough of the program to earn the right to list ‘beta test team’ membership on their resumes. All students but one improved on the exit-test, and many improved significantly. The Writing Center was heartened by the outcome of the beta test and decided to incorporate most of the online material in the next semester’s workshop.

Implementation of the full program began in August 2011. The law school’s Writing Center administered a revised version of the writing skills test to the incoming first-year law students. The new test did not contain any sentence-correction exercises, fill-in-the-blank exercises, or essays. Instead, it contained thirty multiple-choice questions designed to measure the same areas as the previous year’s test. The Writing Center administrators decided to revise the format to expedite the grading process and to eliminate the ‘gray-area’ inherent in grading essays.

Based upon the results of the previous year’s test, the Writing Center administrators anticipated that no more than 80 students would need to be placed into the Writing Skills Workshop. The administrators had intended to set the passing score at 20 out of 30 and had assumed that the majority of the students would score higher than 20. This assumption was erroneous: 260 first-year students took the test. None scored higher than 20. One student scored 20; two students scored 18; and 108 students scored below 10.

The immediate problem with this outcome was that the Writing Skills Workshop had been designed for a maximum of 80 students. The number was not arbitrary; it was chosen so that the students could be divided into four online discussion groups of no more than twenty students each. If the Writing Center set 10 as the ‘passing’ score, 108 students would have been required to attend the semester-long workshop. The Writing Center considered setting the passing score lower – at nine – so that the size of the workshop would be smaller. Only 67 students scored eight or below. However, after considerable discussion, the Writing Center administrators decided to set the passing score at ten and allow 108 students into the workshop so that they all could get the help that they needed.

This decision, however, forced the administrators of the Writing Center to reassess the teaching method for their workshop. Stephanie Juliano was to be the sole instructor of the

14-week workshop. If she followed the beta test model, and limited the online sections to 20 students, she would have to teach six sections every week for a semester. This would be next to impossible – particularly in addition to teaching 108 students in one physical classroom for 50 minutes every week.

To accommodate 108 students, the Writing Center administrators decided to revamp the format of the workshop for just one semester, then reassess the format of the program after that. For the Fall 2011 semester, the main teaching would take place during the 50-minute session in a physical classroom. The online component would allow the 108 students to participate in extended class discussions and access readings, helpful web links, and other materials to review subjects that were covered in each week’s class. Required coursework consisted of these assigned readings, worksheets, one-page handwritten journals, and responses to discussion subjects that the instructor posted in the online classroom. The instructor utilised LexisNexis Blackboard for the site of the online classroom because of the Writing Center’s success with that site during the workshop’s beta test. One of the benefits of this technology was a statistics tracker that showed whether students were reading the required materials.

The decision to eliminate the discussion-driven model of online teaching put greater pressure on the workshop instructor to create more worksheets and in-class mini quizzes to reinforce the classroom lessons. She administered these frequently and then corrected and returned them to her students the next week. She also encouraged the students to meet with her individually to discuss their work; many students availed themselves of this opportunity.

The large size of the class did not deter the instructor from exhibiting creativity in her teaching model. She knew, from her experience working in Touro’s Writing Center, that students frequently do not know how to use commas, semicolons, and colons correctly. For these areas, she distributed ‘hypotheticals’ – legal problems similar to those used in law school exams – that contained punctuation mistakes. She asked her students to write an ‘answer’ in the IRAC format using the appropriate punctuation rules. This exercise not only gave the students added practice in writing exam answers, but the experience also demonstrated whether each student understood the punctuation rules and how to apply them.

Halfway through the semester, the instructor employed a game show format to boost morale in her classroom during a review class. She incorporated the workshop’s reading materials and worksheet exercises into Jeopardy questions. The instructor reported that the students enjoyed the challenge and that the game became increasingly competitive as students reached Final Jeopardy.

After the success of the Jeopardy review session, the instructor reinforced the students’ learning by holding mini reviews at the beginning of each class. She used a more traditional format of mini quizzes comprised of five to 15 questions each. To keep her class of approximately 100 students totally engaged, she employed a variety of interactive techniques rather than just giving the class the correct answers.

The instructor also required the students to submit a one-page handwritten journal on any topic five times during the semester. The purpose of this was to encourage students to embrace writing without the danger of writer’s block. With the help of her teaching assistant, the instructor read and commented in detail on each of these journals. The instructor reported that the journal-writing exercise was not only helpful to her students, but it also enabled her to become better acquainted with her students.

Although the large size of her class forced the instructor to temporarily abandon plans of teaching writing skills through extensive online class discussions, she was able to conduct some limited class discussions in Blackboard’s virtual classroom. Rather than use the topics from the beta test, she experimented with topics that were familiar to first-year students.

Upon completion of the fourteen-week workshop, the Writing Center administered the writing skills retest. The one-hour retest was similar in format and content to the 30-question multiple-choice test that the students took during orientation.

The Writing Center administrators – Stephanie Juliano and I – graded the tests immediately after the exam. Previously, we had discussed the possible outcomes and decided that we would be happy with a 70 per cent pass rate in their initial semester of the new program. We agreed that we would be thrilled with an 80 per cent pass rate. Much to our surprise and happiness, most of the test scores were at least 20 – and many were well above that. The Writing Center had set the passing score at only 10 to make it consistent with the test that the students took before participating in the workshop. With the passing score set at ten on the retest, every student passed. But had the passing score been set at 20 – where we initially wanted to set it – an impressive 85 per cent of the students would have passed. Only 14 out of 91 students would have been required to re-take the workshop.

As with any pilot program, this one was a learning experience – not just for the students, but for the school’s faculty and administration. Perhaps the most important revelation was that many students in the workshop felt stigmatised and demoralised by being included in a subgroup of the student body that was required to take a ‘remedial’ writing program. Additionally, some students who were not required to take the workshop expressed frustration and disappointment because they believed that they had been unfairly closed out of an opportunity to improve their writing skills.

After learning that all but one of the first-year students scored lower than 20 out of 30 in the August 2011 exam, Dean Lawrence Raful suggested a solution: require all first-year students to spend a semester in the Writing Skills Workshop. As a result, the Writing Center is working with the law school’s administration to schedule the workshop as a requirement for all first-year students. The law school will continue to require that all students pass a writing skills test as a condition of graduation, and the passing score will be set at 20.

The program is not a panacea, and it is a work in progress. We have no illusions that the required workshops will transform our students into brilliant writers, but we believe the program to be invaluable in elevating the level of basic writing skills in the student population.


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