Assessing a Cooperative Writing Process in an Undergraduate Legal Writing Course

St. John's Law Review Volume 96 Number 1 Volume 96, Fall 2022, Number 1 Article 3 Assessing a Cooperative Writing Process in an Undergraduate Legal Writing Course James A. Croft Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/lawreview This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at St. John's Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in St. John's Law Review by an authorized editor of St. John's Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact . ASSESSING A COOPERATIVE WRITING PROCESS IN AN UNDERGRADUATE LEGAL WRITING COURSE JAMES A. CROFT† INTRODUCTION I teach legal writing to undergraduate students, and I primarily do so by cooperatively writing with them, using instructional time to work through the students’ writing assignments as a class. I arrived at this process organically over several years. When I first started teaching, I was surprised by the disconnect between my expectations regarding student writing and student performance. To attempt to close that gap, I began going through parts of the research and writing process cooperatively with my students in class, and increasing the amount of work that we did together each semester until, in the semester assessed in this study, the bulk of our class time was spent collectively working through the students’ writing assignments. This study critically evaluates the efficacy of my practice of writing with the students by asking two questions. First, is there evidence that my students, who spent the semester cooperatively writing with me and their peers, demonstrated an improvement in their ability to write independently? Second, how can I improve my teaching process? I attempted to address these questions by reviewing student texts for demonstrated improvement in the following areas: (1) the ability to report on cases and statutes accurately and precisely, includeing the ability to expressly connect those sources to a problem; and (2) use of citations. Both † James Croft is an Associate Professor at St. John’s University in New York, where he serves as the Director of the undergraduate Legal Studies program for the Queens Campus. Prior to joining the St. John’s University faculty, he worked as a restructuring and bankruptcy associate at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, LLP. 77 78 ST. JOHN’S LAW REVIEW [Vol. 96:77 of these qualities of writing are valued at the college level,1 at the law school level, and in legal practice.2 I also surveyed my 1 In pre-professional writing at the college level, students are expected to report on their sources accurately, to apply those sources to problems effectively and expressly and to cite their sources properly. See, e.g., COUNCIL OF WRITING PROGRAM ADMINISTRATORS, WPA OUTCOMES STATEMENT FOR FIRST-YEAR COMPOSITION (2014) (mentioning the need to teach first-year college students to evaluate sources for accuracy and the need to teach those students citation conventions); Arthur L. Costa, Describing the Habits of Mind, in LEARNING AND LEADING WITH HABITS OF MIND: 16 ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS FOR SUCCESS 25, 29 (Arthur L. Costa & Bena Kallick eds., 2008) (including “striving for accuracy” and “thinking and communicating with clarity and precision” as habits of mind of effective people); CHRIS THAISS & TERRY MEYERS ZAWACKI, ENGAGED WRITERS & DYNAMIC DISCIPLINES 4–7 (2006) (calling persistence, discipline and careful attention qualities of “academic writing”); DAVID ROSSENWASSER & JILL STEPHEN, WRITING ANALYTICALLY 4–10, 37–39, 110–11 (5th ed. 2006) (including defining how parts of a problem are related and making implicit points explicit as “analytical moves” and discussing the need for students to expressly make connections between their evidence and their claims, the need for students to cite their sources and the need for students to conform to style guides when writing); The Citation Project: Reframing the Conversation about Plagiarism, CITATION PROJECT, http://www.citationproject.net/ [https://perma.cc/88YJ-FBDD] (last visited Jan. 4, 2020) (studying and documenting student use of citations in college-level source based writing). 2 Similarly, the literature on law student legal writing and professional legal writing highlights the need for legal writers to report on their sources effectively and accurately, to apply those sources to problems effectively and expressly, and to cite their sources properly. See, e.g., ABA SECTION OF LEGAL EDUCATION AND ADMISSIONS TO THE BAR, SOURCEBOOK ON LEGAL WRITING PROGRAMS 7, 24–25, 55 (Eric B. Easton et al. eds., 2d ed. 2006) (discussing accuracy, precision and effective citation throughout); HUNTER M. BRELAND & FREDERICK M. HART, THE LAW SCHOOL ADMISSION COUNCIL, DEFINING LEGAL WRITING: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF THE LEGAL MEMORANDUM tbl.21, app.B (1994) (identifying factors including the following, as elements of a strong legal memorandum: supporting claims with controlling statutes and cases; accurate descriptions of authorities; the establishment of a linkage between the problem and legal authority; and correct citation form); Jessica Clark & Christy DeSanctis, Toward a Unified Grading Vocabulary: Using Rubrics in Legal Writing Courses, 63 J. LEGAL EDUC. 3, 25–29 (2013) (noting the following as elements of a strong legal memorandum: supporting claims with adequate research, accurate use of cases, the express comparison of those cases to the problem at hand and citations); Susan Hanley Kosse & David T. ButleRitchie, How Judges, Practitioners, and Legal Writing Teachers Assess the Writing Skills of New Law Graduates: A Comparative Study, 53 J. LEGAL EDUC. 80, 85–86, 89 (2003) (surveying judges, practitioners, and legal writing teachers on the legal writing skills of recent law graduates and reporting that those respondents identified precision, accuracy and the substantiation of all statements as elements of good writing in legal memoranda and identified citation errors and sloppy language as common problems in legal writing); Kristen K. Robbins-Tiscione, The Inside Scoop: What Federal Judges Really Think about the Way Lawyers Write, 8 LEGAL WRITING: J. LEGAL WRITING INST. 257, 268, 270 (2002) (surveying federal judges on their thoughts about attorney writing and finding that judges value accurate reporting on the law and effective application of the law to the facts of the case); Judith D. Fischer, Bareheaded and Barefaced Counsel: 2022] ASSESSING A COOPERATIVE WRITING PROCESS 79 students about their experience in my course.3 I. MY COURSE I teach legal writing in the American Bar Associationapproved undergraduate legal studies program at St. John’s University in New York. The course, Legal Research and Writing I, is generally the second course that students take in the legal studies major sequence. Ideally, students take the course after taking Introduction to Legal Studies, an introductory course on reading legal texts and legal analysi (...truncated)