How to Talk Like a Lawyer (Second Revision)

I advised cutting by 25%, in the hope that you would realize in the process that the firt draft used 1,000 words to say what could be said in 75, and would begin from there to figure out what your central idea actually was. Lawyers need to be assertive, discerning, and creative, your draft says. That's the topic sentence of a paragraph, with three sentences to follow, on the Graces. That's a good opening, potentially resonant, but after that we actually need a destination. Your story about your parents is my story about the law student boring the life out of a date on Friday night in line at the restaurant. Yes, that's what happens when people are learning law-talk and issue-spotting by immersion.

So where are we going? The reader need an idea to chew on, and you're just a bit short of a breakthrough. Compress the existing draft into a well-worked little box: if you can, make it an epigraph. And let's see what can be dreamt up when we really start dreaming.