Comments on: Welcome to Law School, Part IV

By: Letters of Marque

Letters of Marque — Sun, 17 Jul 2005 15:23:16 +0000

Someone else’s advice, and then my not-advice
Via Blawg Wisdom, I find that Professor Michael Madison also gives advice — no quotation marks needed! — for law school. I think it sounds great, some more great than others. Like, get exercise and write. If you’re not sure…

By: Carlos

Carlos — Sun, 10 Jul 2005 03:29:08 +0000

If you have time, and are seriously resolved to improve your writing and your use of English generally, you can’t go wrong learning as much Classical Latin as you can. (Or alternatively, if you know well a modern Romance language, try to trace its morphological and syntactical development from the Proto-Romance/Vulgar Latin.

Learning Latin has caught a lot of flak in our time. So have the Classics generally. They are slighted for being anachronistic or irrelevant. Yet, every time after reading and analyzing Latin sentences I come away feeling I’ve been given the keys to the kingdom. Nominative, Vocative, Accusative, Genitive, etc., etc., inflection, mode, time, aspect, subjunctive, supine – it really makes you pay attention to what is going on in a sentence -a valuable skill that transfers when reading or writing English. This is not to mention the lexical knowledge that is gained.

All you have to do, when it comes down to it, is pick up an solid, reliable introductory Latin text like Wheelock’s Latin, and set for yourself a simple week-by-week study plan that would take you from the first declension and the first conjugation, say, up through to the use of these forms.

I think it would be a great use of the weeks leading up to law school. My major was philosophy in college. I’ve been in the workforce for a number of years. Now I’m thinking of applying next year to law school and trying to learn to read as much Latin as I can until the crush of application time.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 16:35:53 +0000

I graduated from the University of Michigan with an English concentration a year ago. It wasn’t until I agreed to facilitate a creative writing workshop at a local prison that I faced my own lack of knowledge about the English language.

Part of the problem could be blamed on the introductory composition requirements in most colleges. It’s normal for such classes to be almost solely content-based. A knowledge of basic composition is assumed. Even at the University of Michigan, however, most students arrive seriously lacking such basic skills.

This has been a frustration for me for some time. I graduated from college having generally developed good writing habits, but without real knowledge about how my writing functioned. And as I hinted, it wasn’t until I had to actually teach it, that I buckled down and began learning what I needed to know.

A recommendation might be to read, and reread, “The Elements of Style.” It’s available for free on the internet at http://www.bartleby.com/141/

My advice is to start early. It can take time to be able to easily recognize the key elements of sentence structure that are so important to good writing.