11 Tips to Enhance Your Legal Writing Skills
Students often struggle to score well in their law essays and dissertations. The biggest reason behind their failure is that they don’t have enough legal writing skills. In this post, we’ll discuss a few useful tips that’ll help you enhance your legal writing skills:
1. Take Classes
You should first brush up on your writing skills if you rarely write academic papers or have never scored well in law essays and dissertations. Many of us learned about basic grammar rules and writing techniques back in school. Therefore, we recommend you enrol in an academic writing course. By taking classes, you will re-establish your command over academic writing. You will also learn many grammar, punctuation, and structure rules you weren’t aware of previously. These classes are really important for you if your English is too weak. Professors hate it when there are grammatical and spelling mistakes in your legal papers.
2. Make an Outline
You shouldn’t have a wayward approach while writing a legal paper. The content should be properly organised, and the best way to do it is by creating an outline beforehand. First, write the sections you plan to include in your legal paper. Then, list down the topics you will discuss in each section. Once you’re done creating the outline, you will have a much clearer idea of what your legal paper will look like. An outline will also help you observe errors in your content beforehand and rectify those mistakes before writing the first draft.
3. Be Concise
There’s no room for fluff and unnecessary content in legal papers. You must keep content precise if you want to deliver your message clearly to your audience. Use short sentences, easily understandable words, and eliminate redundancy in your content. Adding unnecessary words will not make your legal paper any better. However, writing concisely will make your legal paper more compelling and impactful. If you have to achieve a certain word count, add more relevant information instead of writing content that doesn’t serve any purpose. You will write an exceptional paper once you manage to strike the perfect balance between information and length.
4. Read a Lot
You have to be a good reader to become a good academic writer. As a lawyer, you should keep reading challenging legal documents to improve your knowledge. You should be a good researcher to write an accurate and impactful legal paper. Moreover, you also have to be highly knowledgeable. Also, the more you read, the better you’ll understand the grammatical structures and figures of speech used in legal papers. You can read documents like case files, legal research papers, dissertations, pleadings, and Supreme Court opinions and beliefs. You will also subconsciously learn the legal tone, structure, and vocabulary by reading legal documents.
5. Avoid Unnecessary Legal Jargons and Phrases
We recommend law students use legal language in their law dissertations and essays. However, you shouldn’t unnecessarily use specialised legal jargons and phrases. Using words like heretofore, wherein, aforementioned, and herewith, will make your writing archaic, abstract, and hardly readable. You need to understand that every person who reads your legal paper might not know about the legal vocabulary and phrases you’re using. You need to keep the language as simple and understandable as possible. For example, instead of writing “I am not in receipt of the aforementioned report”, you can just write, “I didn’t receive the mentioned report”.
6. Write Multiple Drafts
You should never turn in your legal paper after writing the first draft. Some of the most experienced law academic experts write multiple drafts of their law papers after writing the first copy. As students, you will make many mistakes while writing the first draft of your law paper. After finishing your first draft, you will find out that your work was loaded with mistakes when you thoroughly proofread it. Also, you will find areas in your paper’s content that need enhancement. Therefore, you will have written multiple drafts by the time you turn in your legal paper.
7. Proofread Your Work Several Times
This is a mistake most students make. Successful law essay and dissertation writers would thoroughly proofread their work before turning it in. They would go through their papers multiple times to find the slightest of errors. Your legal papers should be almost perfect and free from errors. Once you find all mistakes, edit your paper and then recheck it. You have to keep repeating this process until you are 100% convinced about the quality of your legal paper. Only then you can turn in your paper. Remember, professors in law schools never forgive typos, spelling, and grammatical errors.
8. Ask an Expert to Review Your Legal Paper
There will be mistakes that you might accidentally ignore after completing your paper. This is common even if you proofread and edit it multiple times. Moreover, there might be some issues in your work that only expert academic writers can highlight. Therefore, once you’re done writing the final draft of your paper, send it to a law expert for revision. They will analyse the content and information mentioned in your paper and highlight the mistakes. They will also see whether your writing style is appropriate enough or not. They’ll also check the authenticity of the information and sources in your paper.
9. Use Active Voice
This is a mistake professors hate, as it ruins the tone of a law essay or dissertation. Many students write multiple sentences in their papers with a passive voice. It’s not an issue if you have written a passive voice sentence in your paper for a reason. However, using it multiple times will ruin the quality of your paper. It’s better to replace a sentence with an active voice sentence if it is unnecessarily in passive voice. Active voice makes the tone of your paper more compelling and keeps the readers engaged. So, instead of writing, “Mr Silva was assaulted by his wife, Mrs Kate”, you should write, “Mrs Kate assaulted Mr Silva”.
10. Keep Your Audience in Consideration
You should always keep your audience in consideration while writing any legal document. Every word of your law dissertation or essay should be tailored for your reader. Your paper should grab their attention from the first word and keep them hooked until the end. If your paper addresses a certain person, the content should address them. For example, if you have written a brief to the court, you should advocate and persuade the reader with legal arguments. If you are writing a memorandum to your client, you should analyse the issues.
11. Mention Your Legal Arguments in Topic Sentences
You have to mention the main legal argument of your paper in the thesis statement. It is a one or two-sentence long statement written at the end of the introductory section. You will have to write a topic sentence for each body paragraph or section to support your paper’s thesis statement. The topic sentences will contain your legal arguments. The thesis statement and topic sentences should be precise, accurate, and to the point.
Why Is Legal Writing So Difficult?
Legal writing is one of the toughest forms of academic skills to master. Most students struggle to score well in their law dissertations and essays because they don’t have the legal writing skills to write compelling and accurate papers. The information in legal documents should be accurate, precise, and free from irrelevancy. Moreover, law essays and documents should follow a certain tone and vocabulary. You also need to be highly knowledgeable and a good researcher to write high-quality law papers. If you lack these skills, we will gladly help you out.
Importance of Legal Writing
Have you ever wondered?
“Why do the students require a law dissertation?”
Well, it’s because legal writing helps law students in many aspects of their academic and professional life. It improves your critical and argumentative writing skills. You will also end up improving your interviewing skills. You will be able to conduct successful interviews with clients and write their statements. Also, lawyers need to submit a well-written statement of claim while instituting any action before the court.
How to Submit Law Dissertations or Essays on Tight Deadlines?
Writing law dissertations is extremely difficult. You should not only be highly knowledgeable about the topic, but you should also research accurate information from reliable sources. Managing your law dissertation when you have other coursework pending is quite difficult. If you want to submit your law dissertation on time, you should opt for a legal essay writing service. While many websites offer such services, you should only trust Law Essay Teacher, the best and most affordable legal essay writing service.
So, hire a legal writer from Law Essay Teacher today if you want to start scoring well in your law essays and dissertation! Our services are reasonably priced, as we want every student to be able to afford our law essay help. Are you a student who has always struggled to write high-scoring law essays and dissertations? Well, your struggle ends here. You will turn in exceptional law papers on time with the help of our experts. Place your order today!
