Time Waits for Nothing

As I said last time, the important first step was to figure out how to articulate the central idea in a sentence and to begin the essay with it. That hasn't happened.

"The importance of time was explored in an early class discussion of Lawyerland when Moglen posited that within the legal realm, time is one of the most important realms of legal media." (Usually, when we use a surname in formal writing, we give it an addition. I don't mind being "Eben" at all, but I'm "Professor" or "Mr." if you use my surname, right?) Did I "posit" something, or state it? Surely you don't think I said that "within the legal realm, time is one of the most important realms of legal media"? I said, "time is the most important medium in which lawyers work." "Medium" there means tool of art, as oil paint, watercolor, terra cotta or cast bronze. If the idea struck you at the time, then we might expect you to explain what I meant, which you don't.

"Undergrad" is slang for "college."

In fact, it was something that was openly talked about without shame. If <span style="background-color: #cc6688; color: yellow; padding-left: 3px; padding-right: 3px">a student didn’t believe that <span style="background-color: #cc6688; color: yellow; padding-left: 3px; padding-right: 3px">they would be able to produce quality work within a specific time period, <span style="background-color: #cc6688; color: yellow; padding-left: 3px; padding-right: 3px">they should not be forced to do so. I remember I didn’t turn in a term paper until two months after the initial deadline, and I still received an A in the class. That’s not to say that I didn’t respect the deadlines that my professor had set for me. Instead I came to appreciate the pursuit of knowledge and gained confidence in the belief that there was a level of knowledge on a subject that I could reach before I was asked to produce a product that reflected my knowledge on a topic.

Surely you can render this last sentence in 10 words instead of 44? In addition to brevity, the writing lacks concreteness. Every noun here is abstract.

In looking at time; it had always been my philosophy that <span style="background-color: #cc6688; color: yellow; padding-left: 3px; padding-right: 3px">things will work <span style="background-color: #cc6688; color: yellow; padding-left: 3px; padding-right: 3px">itself out versus me finding the need to take advantage of time and using it to shape the outcome of events.

Neither terse nor grammatical. The semi-colon is wrongly used. "Philosophy" is a high word for habit. The sentence means "In the past, I have been undisciplined in my management of time." That's 12 words doing better the work of 35.

Although I loved that my <span style="background-color: #cc6688; color: yellow; padding-left: 3px; padding-right: 3px">undergrad experience allowed me to grow personally and professionally as an individual, Columbia Law School has shown me over and over again that this is not the way of the world and if I continue to view the world like this, there will not be much room for advancement.

A run-on sentence badly composed. It means "Law school is forcing me to reconsider the habits that served me well in college." That's 15 words doing better the work of 50. Do you see from these examples what editing habits you need to acquire? Writing simply and clearly well help you to think more clearly and more forcefully.

In order to achieve some balance, I have to reconcile the ways in which I used to view time with the new ways in which I am being asked to utilize time. As I step back and realize that I am finished with my first year of law school, I realize that I am an adult. I am in professional School.

Why the capital S?

I am now not only responsible for my own financial and personal needs, but also those of my clients. Even though I am placed in a position of power, I feel that I really do not possess a lot of power. Rather I feel like I am being impacted by time rather than controlling it.

Isn't that precisely the consequence of an undisciplined approach to time? Social action occurs "in" time. Understanding, predicting and intervening in social processes requires good timing. Waiting for "things to work [themselves] out" is the antithesis of a disciplined approach to social action. It is, in other words, not lawyering. For the lawyer, patience—playing a waiting game, enjoying the fruits of time—is a tactical decision, arrived at in order to achieve a specific objective at tolerable cost. It isn't a habit, a "philosophy," or a symptom of untreated anxiety.

I have found that there is a tension in the two ways in which I view time. There is a tension between getting things (as in going through the motions) and doing things with purpose (with passion). The first is just following a specific structure. This utilizes efficiency and allows things to get done in a timely fashion. Just because you are in the motion of doing something does not mean that you will be doing that thing whole heartedly. Meeting deadlines and completing something in a certain fashion often comes at the cost of being able to application of creativity and imagination to the written assignment.

This is coherent with what precedes it. Organization of the essay, weak throughout, breaks down here. Degree of commitment to an activity (among which two possible degrees are "passion" and "going through the motions") seems evidently a new subject, intruding in a fashion the reader has not been given a basis to expect or understand.

The last sentence is a statement of a personal condition, not a general truth. "Meeting deadlines and completing something in a certain fashion" (a typically abstract phrase) is only in tension with "being able to [apply] creativity and imagination" to "a written assignment" if one hasn't gained habits of disciplined work, and if writing remains a puzzle, an obstacle, rather than a way of producing imaginative, creative results. (Note how weak your self-editing was: You left an ungrammatical sentence, containing the nonsense phrase "being able to application of creativity," unrevised.)

Why is a truism the topic sentence of this paragraph?

How society tends to conceptualize time can often be more complicated then this simple assertion.

Then why did you begin your paragraph with it? The reader inevitably gains the impression that you don't know where you're going and you're just wasting her time.

The value that <span style="background-color: #cc6688; color: yellow; padding-left: 3px; padding-right: 3px">people within society <span style="background-color: #cc6688; color: yellow; padding-left: 3px; padding-right: 3px">places on time can also vary with what they place value on.

Another thundering tautology, expressed ungrammatically. You must edit every sentence for agreement of number in each clause; your mistakes of this kind are frequent, and you must catch all of them.

On the one hand, it does lead to perceived practical outcomes; people are more focused, work with more of a sense of urgency, and work becomes more efficient. On the other hand, it constrains what an individual can focus on. Sometimes precision has to be sacrificed because of the sense of urgency that is placed on something. Also, what can be focused on becomes much more limited. In order to achieve one, the other has to be discarded.

What is "it"? Grammatically, it would seem to be "the value that people place[] on time." But that doesn't make sense here. The remainder of the paragraph seems to assert that we trade efficiency in time for precision or (and?) breadth of focus. Perhaps this is true, perhaps it isn't. Better management of time should impose fewer such trade-offs. I tell the lawyers who work for me that we enjoy the benefit of practicing law slowly, because of the economic organization of our practice. But that doesn't mean we are less productive, or efficient: it means that we don't sell hours, so we don't measure our activity by the number of tasks per hour. We measure rather the number and quality of results achieved with the available resources, including but not limited to working time.

Without a doubt, people who have come before questioned how they could best utilize the time that was available to them, organized their time in light of the different constraints that exist, and impacted how people in the present reflect upon their time.

What does this sentence mean?

This isn't a conclusion, following something that isn't an argument or the development of an idea.

We haven't moved far enough past the first draft. We need a clearer and more precise central idea, stated at the outset, developed through steps that can be placed in sequence on a tightly-edited outline. We need accurately composed sentences that are brief, clear, and concrete.

Certainly it would be desirable to connect what you have to say with the ideas of others. But "integrating more outside sources" (why "more"? there aren't any here) is not an independent objective: thinking better about the subject is the objective. Reading what other people think about the same and related subjects is a step in that direction. I would have expected you to begin in that fashion: "I'm going to write something about time and work: Who has written about time and work in ways I might find useful in order to build my own thinking?" Why didn't that happen?