Differences btw college writing & legal writing

Dear 1L,

If you want to succeed in legal writing this year, you’ll need to forget what you’ve learned about how to organize a body paragraph.

For high-school and college writing, you likely did something like:

Topic Sentence
Explanation
1st Example/Quote
2nd Example/Quote
3rd Example/Quote
Conclusion

But in legal writing, you must do:

Conclusion
Rule
Explanation
Analysis
Conclusion

Legal writing even gives you an acronym for the order: CREAC.

{Some legal-writing professors use TRAC (Thesis-Rule-Analysis-Conclusion) or other variations of CREAC, but try not to get caught up in the differences. In the end, all these acronyms do essentially the same thing).

Many law students, myself included, try to fight the system.

Please don’t try.

You will fail, just like I (almost) did.

Lawyers need their paragraphs done in a particular order. The earlier you accept that, the better you’ll fare.

💌 Amanda

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🗳️ I’m trying to identify all the differences between college writing and legal writing for you and then write about each one.

Next up will be brevity and simplicity of word choice & sentence structure.

👉 What other differences do you identify between college writing & legal writing?

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#lawstudents
#lawyers
#legalwriting