Editor's Corner: On Rigor and Brevity

• Author: Tonia Hap Murphy
• Published date: 01 March 2012
• Date: 01 March 2012
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-1722.2011.01096.x

Editor’s Corner: On Rigor and Brevity

Many lament the writing skills of business students and businesspeople.1What

sorts of written assignments will cultivate better writing skills? Richard Arum

and Josipa Roksa address this question in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning

on College Campuses,2an influential new book reviewed by Professors Joshua

Perry and Jamie Prenkert in this issue of the Journal of Legal Studies Education

(JLSE).

The authors of Academically Adrift advocate “rigorous academic endeav-

ors”3and in measuring rigor adopt a benchmark of more than twenty pages

of writing in a semester-long course.4Such writing might take the form of one

or more lengthy, traditional “term papers.” Students whose written efforts are

1See, e.g., Dave Carpenter, Business, B-Schools Fight Bad Writing,Wash. Post, Dec. 5, 2006, http://

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/05/AR2006120500772.html

(“Like a dark and stormy night, bad writing has long shadowed the business world—from

bureaucratese to mangled memos to the clich´

e-thick murk of corporatespeak.”); Schumpeter,

Business Has Much to Learn from the Arts,Economist, Feb. 19, 2011, at 76 (observing that bosses’

“prose is larded with clich´

es and garbled with gobbledegook”); David Silverman, Why Is Business

Writing So Bad?,Harv. Bus. Rev. Blog (Feb. 10, 2009, 5:10 p.m.), http://blogs.hbr.org/

silverman/2009/02/why-is-business-writing-so-bad.html (noting students’ use of “prose that is

full of expensive-sounding words: nonfunctional, cadre, tantamount, individual, utilize. Before they

are legal to drink, my students are already using those words rather than these: broken, group,

this means, person, use.”).

2Richard Arum & Josipa Roksa,Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College

Campuses (2011). Arum and Roksa measured student learning by scores on the Collegiate

Learning Assessment (CLA), which is designed to assess “core outcomes espoused by all of

higher education—critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving and writing.” Id. at

21. Test-takers respond to a writing prompt simulating a real-world task, with reference to a

set of background documents. Id. at 21–23. The CLA’s scoring rubric measures whether “the

presentation is clear and concise, the structure of the argument is well-developed and effective,

the work is persuasive, the written mechanics are proper and correct, and reader interest is

maintained.” Id. at 22.

3Id. at 129.

4Id. at 70–71.

C2012 The Author

Journal of Legal Studies Education C2011 Academy of Legal Studies in Business

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