Post by Stephen Horowitz, Professor of Legal English
Prof. Rachel T. Goldberg of Cornell Law School recently published an intriguing article titled “Recovering Grammar” in The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute.
In the article, she proposes an idea that is not necessarily new to those teaching legal English or English for Academic Purposes. But it is likely new, and likely goes against the grain, for those in the US law school legal writing community.
The main point: There’s a whole other way to think about grammar than the way you probably learned to think about it. And it involves shifting to an understanding of grammar as one more rhetorical tool in a legal writer’s rhetorical toolbox, i.e., connecting grammar to communicative purpose, rather than viewing grammar as a series of pedantic, nitpicky rules to be followed for the sake of propriety.
What this looks like in practice, speaking broadly, is taking a text (or comparing multiple texts) and drawing attention to (or reverse engineering if that term is more appealing) grammar choices made by writers for certain purposes in certain contexts. And by becoming more aware of these choices, including the terms or labels for them, gaining a stronger ability to draw on them for one’s own communicative and rhetorical purposes. [Note: This is something a number of us teaching in the Georgetown 2-Year LLM Program already incorporate in our teaching, and which we’re planning to write a future blog post about to help build on and further demonstrate the ideas in Prof. Goldberg’s article.]
Prof. Goldberg’s article also suggests incorporating a rhetorical approach to grammar as a tool for boosting inclusivity in the teaching of legal writing. She explains in her article:
Many of us teach students from a variety of language backgrounds: international students from non-English-speaking countries who learned English in their home countries, immigrants or refugees who may have had a few years of high school or college in the United States, and monolingual students who grew up in the United States speaking a non-prestige or stigmatized version of English……
Seeing grammar from a functional, rhetorical view can help us be more hospitable to those whose legal writing reflects marginalized and alternative grammars. And it just might help minimize our own frustrations with teaching and critiquing our students’ grammar choices.
I also appreciate her suggestion that teachers of legal writing avoid the practice of including “grammar” as part of a student’s grade, given that it’s unfair to grade students on something that hasn’t been taught in class. Especially since it privileges those who grew up with prestige English. As Goldberg mentions, we wouldn’t lower a student’s grade for not following CREAC discourse if we hadn’t explicitly taught it as the preferred discourse for the class.
Of course, one of the challenges and a great topic for ongoing discussion and a future blog post remains how to combine a rhetorical approach to grammar with factoring in the need to prepare law students for work in an environment and community that still views and values grammar in the more traditional way (e.g., judges, large law firms, legal academica, etc.)
Goldberg includes a number of activities that can be used in legal writing to draw student attention to the notion of grammar as a rhetorical tool in itself. She has had students analyze the grammar choices of writers that students admire as well as the grammar of writing in different genres, e.g., science writing vs. social media writing vs. legal writing, etc. And she gives some potentially helpful ways to comment on student grammar from a different perspective, though she acknowledges the logistical challenges of intensive commenting along these lines. Additionally, in my experience, it also takes time and practice to build up a repertoire of the kinds of comments needed to address the range of grammar issues that present themselves and to do so in a way that is concretely helpful for students.
The takeaway is that grammar understanding and awareness, when appropriately contextualized and understood, is a valuable tool for better legal writing and can also serve as a mechanism for reducing the gate-keeping mentality we have traditionally learned to associate with grammar.
For more about the article, see the abstract below. (And feel free to get in touch with me if you ever want to discuss with someone. I always enjoy thinking about and engaging with others on this topic!)
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Abstract for “Recovering Grammar” by Rachel T. Goldberg
Three major reasons have been proposed for why legal writing professors do not—or should not—teach grammar. First, the argument goes, teaching grammar would take valuable time away from more important, higher-order writing concerns. Second, some legal writing professors do not feel comfortable teaching grammar because, while they can certainly spot grammar problems in their students’ writing, they never learned technical grammar terms themselves. Third, legal writing professors steer clear of grammar because it is perceived to be associated with remedial writing and “mere” skills teaching—associations that further confine legal writing professors to a lower academic status than their clinical and doctrinal peers.
In this article, I argue that a broader, rhetorical approach to grammar minimizes the negative associations with grammar teaching. I make the case that we shouldn’t divorce grammar from the “rest” of legal writing because grammar itself is rhetorical: necessary for and deeply tied to meaning-making and social practices. I contend that a rhetorical approach to grammar can actually enhance our field’s language-focused disciplinary identity. Moreover, I argue that a rhetorical approach to grammar will help ensure that students with diverse language practices feel included and supported, while at the same time providing all students with the linguistic-convention awareness that will allow them to write for successful legal practice. Ultimately, because grammar is foundational—constitutive of and integral to all other components of legal writing—I encourage legal writing professors to embrace grammar from a rhetorical perspective and center it as an important and intellectual part of the first-year legal writing course.
