Learning Lessons from the Deaf Community

I think the central subject of this essay, despite its only occasional appearance, is the effect of your learning ASL on your development as a lawyer. This is an excellent subject, and this essay is a fine place to think about it. The best route to improvement, therefore, is to make more space to write about the subject. There is much material here that played the role necessary in a first draft, that it got you started, which like figure lines in a drawing, can now be removed. At first read I was a little surprised that you spent so many words on one TV show, to the disadvantage of the reading you no doubt have done about the history of deaf communities, about the history of sign language in general and ASL in particular, about Gallaudet, about the ambivalent politics of whether to rely on hearing leadership there and in other centers of deaf intellectual and moral life, and so on. On further consideration, it seems to me that whether the literature discussed is merely the TV version or the fullness of your study, it would all still be out of place here. Let's try to focus the next draft not on providing 500 words of background on the background, which can only be a tiny scratch on the surface, but on adding 500 more words on what your learning of ASL and about deafness in America means to your learning to be a lawyer. Whatever else happens to the essay, whatever you decide to do further with it, that version will play an important role in the trajectory you plot through law school, and it will be a privilege for me to help contribute to it.