In one sense, this is the counterpart to the inquiry I suggest in response to your first essay. It is a reflection on what you haven't been taught, more than have not been learning, in the past year, and establishes a way in which you do not feel more effective or socially powerful. It is also a subtle continuance of the line you were on, without the social theorist or the social theory, but with a sensitive and insightful understanding of the effect of socialization on your parents, and on you.

The two parts of the essay don't join neatly at the moment, leaving me to wonder whether the effort should be to join them more closely, or to concentrate instead on the second, more immediately pressing, of the parts.

Justification could be given for the failure. It's hard to teach people to write like lawyers who don't yet have control of legal language. (This is in fact one of the primary problems with situating where the "legal writing" offering is presently situated. But freshman composition is for freshmen, right?) Teaching writing is difficult at all, and is obviously impossible at the high student-faculty ratios characteristic of law school courses taught by experienced career teachers who are also capable lawyers. Such people are too important, and have too many valuable and necessary things to say, to justify using their time to correct peoples' sentence structure. We are an elite institution, and should take students who already know how to write well, etc.

There are some important elements of truth in all these excuses. They amount, indeed, to a pretty strong showing that changes would have to be made in order for you to get the assistance in learning that you think you need. As you will have guessed, I don't think the excuses, good as they are, justify not making the necessary changes. So the inquiry becomes, how to change. That requires experimentation. This is one experiment.

In my view, we need to use the basic technology of the 21st century, networked collaborative communication, to increase massively our productivity as teachers in reading, editing, and helping students to collaborate in editing, their writing. We need to make that activity a present, indeed central, part of the workflow in every course. We need to deliver experiences of writing, editing, rewriting and rethinking, in every teaching interaction we design. Properly developed, this set of changes will make it possible to take future students, produced by "drill and kill" test-focused primary and secondary education systems lightly dusted with the "college research paper" fallacy, and prevent them from becoming significantly deteriorated writers and thinkers, which will otherwise occur over the next two decades.

But if you really mean to be someone who cares about words, you must be more intent in training your consumption than your production. Everything you write is a reflection of everything you read. And everything you read without retaining you might as well not have read at all.

The decay of reading in most young peoples' lives is more serious than the decay of writing. Law school is even more flawed in what it encourages people to read than in what it doesn't bother to encourage them to write.

Almost everyone has a great deal of catching up to do. But the habits of constant connection and the resulting low priority accorded to memory training (in which people have gone from not being able to remember any Shakespeare, because they haven't read any, to not being able to remember any telephone numbers, because they're all stored in the cellphone, and who calls people anyway when you can click to leave a message on some completely-surveilled, totally data-mined, no-privacy-here "wall"?) mean that no one is building habits that would allow catching up to occur. Most of the young adults with whom I deal are fifteen years behind on the reading they should have done, and are building or have built life habits that will prevent them from catching up, let alone proceeding further, in a long lifetime. They have been brought to believe that grades matter, that what you need to read is what will be on the test, that the condition of "having no time to read" is a non-emergency that can persist for years without harm after graduation, and so on.

The reality, however, is that one's mind is stocked with all the words and all the concepts one leads it to and helps it hold. I never took a test, or wrote a paper, or a letter, or a brief, or a license, without drawing upon both words and concepts I came upon in contexts very far from the immediate occasion, or the "reading list." I needed Bleak House to write an exam in English Legal History, while Finnegans Wake provided both a quotation and an argument in a brief in the US Supreme Court. All the history I've ever read that's carried in my head has affected every strategic decision I've ever made in ways I'd never be able to define.

Reading and remembering are the bones of writing. Law school at present does, as you see, a poor job dressing the body. But the real harm to the physiology of the mind is being done elsewhere. Not only can you meditate on what to do for the benefit of your own intellectual and stylistic development, you could also consider how, as a person trained to produce social consequences using words, you might put your powers to work dealing with the problem more broadly, so as to avoid the destruction of the intellectual environment of many more people.