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PrashantRaiSecondPaper 4 - 06 Jul 2012 - Main.SkylarPolansky
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| META TOPICPARENT | name="SecondPaper" |
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Control the Narrative | | | Eben, I would like to keep working on both of my papers after the formal grading period ends. Thank you for a great semester. | |
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> | I think this paper is wonderful. You make nice use of stories at each turning point in the paper. I see three main areas for improvement. First, the paragraphs need to be tied together more tightly. Second, the point of each paragraph is a little lost because the topic sentence never appears until the end of the paragraph. The reader doesn't have an idea of the point you are building up to, until the point is made. Third, the concluding sentence at the end of the paper establishes a conclusion – placing more emphasis on studying stories in law school will help us to become more powerful advocates - but doesn’t elaborate on how this will happen. How will finding the stories in cases and talking about our own life stories help us to become more powerful advocates? It’s a nice concept and I agree with you, but I feel like this part of the paper needs to be fleshed out a little more.
I reconstructed what I read to be your outline, so as to help you focus on what I as a reader took away from the paper, and see how to connect each paragraph together more fluidly. I think most of it is really good but the weakest link/place where I got the most lost was the point you were trying to make in paragraph 3. I think if you put a sentence at the beginning of this paragraph that outlines the point you are trying to make in the rest of the paragraph, it might tie in that paragraph a little more nicely.
Para 1: At the beginning of law school I learned each case had a unique story behind it and a general principle could not generate fair outcomes without careful tailoring to the details of each case.
Para 2: As the year progressed I learned that in order to succeed on an exam a grade-focused student has an incentive to ignore the narratives that underlie the cases in favor of a generalized, impersonal approach. I’ll point out that this trap is only a problem if the student remains focused on the grade. A student who ignores grades, as Moglen suggests, might not suffer this fate.
Para 3: The way courses are conducted also supports this view, and furthermore promulgates the idea that this reductive pattern, taking the human story out of a case, is necessary to succeed as a lawyer as well.
Para 4: The way in which the law school focuses on generalization at the cost of personalization might be damaging, especially if we are the future of the law.
Additionally, I made some minor edits to word choices and sentence construction throughout the first two paragraphs, that I think convey your point a bit more succinctly (15 words more succinctly, to be exact). You can change that back to the original if you don't like it.
-- SkylarPolansky
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You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines: |
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