KATHRYN IN CHILE, POST #6

It´s been really interesting watching my mom work these past two weeks. I haven´t seen her work since I was little, and then I couldn´t appreciate how good she is at what she does. She works one on one with law students on teaching them effective legal writing, and she teaches law professors how to teach their students to write well. It´s downright eerie how similar her approach to coaching writing is to my approach to coaching writing as a Writing Associate. As a college student, I also have a new appreciation for her teaching style. To illustrate the difference between legal writing and literary writing, She told this true story to her seminar about a judge who retired from law after like 40 years in the field. He finally had time to read for fun instead of reading legal memos, so he started reading some classic novels. He opened up A Tale of Two Cities, and read

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it ws the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way."

He thought to himself, 'WTF? It contradicts itself, it jumps from subject to subject with no apparent connection in between, it´s redundant, and it doesn´t tell me anything. This is crap!' And he throws the book away.

Five years ago, I would have thought, Oh, Mom, there you go again. But now I think that´s a pretty funny story and a pretty effective demonstration of the difference between the legal writing audience and the reading for pleasure audience.