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lawyers and literature Read to Write
Texts of Our Own Making
Ways of Reading to Write These comments are drawn from David Bartholomae & Anthony Petrosky, Ways of Reading (Boston: Bedford Books/St. Martin's Press, 4th ed., 1996):
Bartholomae and Petrosky want students to read texts "that leave some work for a reader to do," texts that require "invite students to be active, critical readers, that present powerful readings of common experience, that open up the familiar world and make it puzzling, rich, and problematic." [vi]
The meaning of what you read is "something you develop as you go along, something for which you must take final responsibility. The meaning is forged from reading the essay [or story], to be sure, but it is determined by what you do with the essay, by the connections you can make and your explanation of why those connections are important, and by your account. . . ." of it. [8]
Bartholomae and Petrosky encourage their students to be "strong readers" and to "actively interpret" what they read, "to use a story or an essay as a way of framing experience, as a source of terms and methods to enable you to interpret something else—some other text, events and objects around you, or your own memories and experience." [15]
Each selection in Bartholomae and Petrosky's collection of readings is followed by a page (less or more) of text devoted to "Questions for a Second Reading."
Write About What Brought You to the Course. When you've finished see if you can identify the steady stream of cliches you've used in this simple writing exercise. "I thought the course would be interesting." Or, "I needed to take a break from the more traditional law school courses." "I needed a perspective requirement." "The course was being offered at a convenient time." See if you can get beyond the cliches and conventional ways of talking about the decision to take the course. Try your hand at a paragraph or two in which you try to generate a "literary response to the question. How could you write about your decision in a way that might provoke or entice the reader to want to know more about you? Or, you might want to say something about a hole or void or emptiness in legal education that you secretly hope the course might fill. Perhaps you have an inordinate love for books, or a particular book, and it is this passion for books and for reading that brings you to the course. You might write a tribute to a former teacher, a teacher who taught you to read, or one from whom you learned to appreciate literature. Your tribute to this teacher might be a way to honor the person who set you upon a course of reading that prompted you to take the course. The basic question is whether you can find a way to talk about your interest in literature and your desire to escape other law school courses, or follow on previous literature courses you might have taken without sounding like a great bore. Is it really the case that law students and everything they write must be boring? I assume not. I would argue that Sheila, the protagonist in J.S. Marcus, "Centaurs" offers a variety of comments about legal education and her fellow students, not a single one of which I found boring. Indeed, I would like to meet Sheila, buy her an espresso at the Blue Moose, and hear more about her days as a law student. Get Your Teacher Involved in Your Writing. Send me an email message and attach one of your early writings. Tell me what you want to know about the writing. What have you tried to do in the writing? What obstacles did you face? If you don't want to share an early literary effort at writing, you might want to discuss your concerns about writing, what you need to know now to get your writing off to a good start. What concerns about writing would you like to address during the course of the semester? Get A Colleague in the Course Involved in Your Writing. What most of us want as writers are good readers. Your instructor may or may not turn out to be a good reader of your work. Try your writing out on a fellow student. Ask for an honest opinion. Ask a fellow student about a writing: Was it well written? Was it interesting? Did it entice you to want to read further? What you want from a colleague or a teacher is what Peter Elbow calls a "movie of the mind." You aren't asking someone to edit your writing or instruct you on proper grammar. What you most want to know is what kind of effect your writing had on the reader. Get Involved With Your Own Writing. It's never too late to become a writer, to develop a serious interest in writing, to make a commitment to the craft of writing. One might even assume that developing such an interest might affect the way you see yourself as a lawyer, indeed, might dramatically improve your skills as a practicing lawyer. Here are some suggestions on learning to write: Write. Most writers struggle to learn the craft of writing. You might begin by writing a letter to the editor of the local paper expressing concern about something going on in the community. Or, you might write a letter to an admired teacher expressing appreciation for her contribution to your education. Read Kafka's parable again and write one yourself. Write a short exploratory essay in which you describe your first real sense of reading, your first awareness of books, or the first time you were in a library. Write about a difficult text you were asked to read and how you dealt with the difficulty. Write about your experience in law school, about the difficulties you've encountered, the tests and trials you've encountered. Observe what goes on in the classroom. Right an account of what you observe. Keep a journal where you can write freely. Keep the journal with you during the day and make notes about things you observe, things people say that catch your ear, things that seem to have a connection to your reading in the course. Do a 10 minute "free writing" exercise every day. A "free writing" basically whatever comes to mind without trying to censor and shape it into a working you will present to others to read. Write. Write. Write. Peter Elbow, one of my favorite writing teachers, explains how we write better if we write in ways that are unconstrained, unedited, uncensored. Of course, the more "free writing" we produce, the more writing we will have to edit and censor. The more you write, the more you are willing to throw away the garbage you find in your writing. Elbow claims that in writing freely, writing without censoring, and writing often, you will indeed produce garbage but writing freely and extensively also produces the best opportunity to create ideas and writing that will reflect your best thoughts, your voice, your depth, and whatever sparkle you might have in you. Elbow does not ignore the importance of editing, but laments the way we try to edit as we write. Elbow claims that writing and editing are two distinct tasks and we mistakenly try to do them both as the same time and that doing so impedes our writing. If your interested in becoming a good writer, you might want to read Peter Elbow's Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing process (New York: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. 1998). It's the kind of book that can be read cover to cover, notwithstanding the fact that the title makes it sound like some kind of writer's manual. Elbow writes about writing in an engaging and thoughtful way, indeed, his writing is a model of clarity and human sensibility. It turns out to be nothing like any manual you've ever read. Reading a Student Paper The commentary you gave me to read is serviceable
enough and it suggest you are willing to read a literary work and try
to make some connections to your own life. The next move is to learn
something about your writing, about its literary qualities, and something
about yourself, something that the story makes possible. You ask whether the Kafka parable can be related to your own life. In terms of the Kafka parable the connection of story to life may have seemed rather obvious to you. While finding the connection between the story and the questions and concerns in our own life is a worthwhile effort, you might want to see if its possible to get beyond pointing out the surface connections. The first question may be is there a relationship between this story and my life, and if so, then the next question is whether the story text helps take you beyond the articulation of the obvious connections. You'll want to attempt to get from pointing to exploring. And how is one to do that? The question, put most basically is this: How does this story inform or shape your understanding of those elements in your life you think the story points to. If the questions you raise about your life and where you are going could just as easily have been raised in a conversation with a friend over a beer, or indeed are exactly the kind of questions that already occupy your time and energies, then how this story made any real demands on you? If the story doesn't shape/influence/channel/change/challenge/provoke new thinking about the situation you are in, then it's hard to see how reading the story really matters at all. And if the story hasn't made any difference in how you see the world, frame questions, confront questions, deal with questions, and try to understand your situation, isn't it fair to say that reading the story has been something of an academic exercise rather than a real learning experience? Where do you go from here? 1) Rewrite the
commentary and examine the editing work that has been done on it. Many
writers take offense at editors playing around with their words. Other
writers praise their editors. You might want to deal, up front, with
whether you are the kind of person who takes offense or offers praise.
2) When you rewrite the commentary see if you can, in some way, get
from pointing to the questions and aspects of your life suggest by Kafka's
parable, to showing how the parable changes your understanding of the
questions/direction/purpose/life you outline. I don't mean to suggest
that reading a Kafka parable sets you off on a new course in life or
in reading it you should re-invent yourself as a person. You might want
to establish only that reading Kafka: 1) changed the way you word a
question; 2) provides a new question; 3) helps answer a question you
thought unanswerable; 4) helps you see as a wonderful mystery what you
thought to be an annoying problem; 5) or, even leads to the nasty conclusion
that the parable was simply inadequate to the task it left you high
and dry, no answers in sight, no new questions, no alteration of questions
you brought to the reading. Miscellanous Thoughts
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In Lawyers and Literature, we
use writing to:
put the mind to work on the lawyer stories
we read, to engage serious and troubling texts, and to use these texts/stories
to say something about our own lives and the profession we have taken
up, indeed to focus on the possibilities and difficulties faced in
linking the stories we read with stories we are living, the stories
we read with the stories that we are now confident will not be anything
like our own
"An
astonishing number of those who can read and write think that they do
so rather well. I spent twenty years as a journalist, and I met all
kinds of men and women who prided themselves on what they called their
'communication skills'; they would tell you, with an unconvincing show
of modesty, that they thought they could write 'a pretty good letter,'
It was my duty as an editor to deal with their pretty good letters,
and I never ceased to be astonished at how badly people expressed themselves
who did well in the world as lawyers, doctors, engineers, and the like.
When they were angry they seemed unable to focus their anger; they roared
like lions, and like lions they roared on no identifiable note. When
they wished to express grief they fell into cliché and trivialized
their sincere feeling by the awful prose in which they expressed it.
When they were soliciting money for charity, they pranced and cavorted
in coy prose, or else they tried to make the reader's flesh creep with
tales of horrors that may have been true but did not sound true. I used
to wonder what made them write as they did, and whenever I was able
to find out I discovered that it was because of the dreadful prose they
read and the way they read it. They admired cheap stuff, they imitated
cheap stuff, and they appeared to have no understanding of how they
cheapened their own minds and their powers of expression by doing so."
[Robertson Davies, Reading and Writing 2-3 (Salt Lake
City: University of Utah Press, special ed., 1993)(1992)]
