Fresh Ears, Fresh Eyes: Final Editing Through Reading Aloud - Sarah Gerwig-moore

• Citation: Vol. 63 No. 3
• Publication year: 2012

Fresh Ears, Fresh Eyes: Final Editing Through Reading Aloud

by Sarah Gerwig-Moore*

I have always found the final editing process to be the most difficult. Each year in my clinic, The Habeas Project, my students and I may file as many as seven or eight court briefs. Belying the name "brief," these documents are not short. And after working on a project for three or six or even nine months, it is common for teachers and students alike to lose momentum and interest in a project along with the ability to find the typo in the haystack.¹

My clinic students are tired (and sometimes both sick AND tired) from working long weeks and months on the same set of facts, cases, and legal issues.² They are often so tired, in fact, that their eyes glaze over misspellings, extra punctuation, or other typographical errors.³ They do not notice that we have used the same phrase, "the court held," to begin the last four sentences. They skim over the subject-verb disagreement that has cropped up in the latest revision. The run-on sentence avoids their notice. So how is a teacher to reinforce the importance of careful final editing while keeping the project interesting and new?

* Associate Professor of Law, Mercer University, Walter F. George School of Law. Mercer University (B.A., 1997); Candler School of Theology (MTS, 2002); Emory Law School (J.D., 2002). Special thanks to Justin Kenney for his able research assistance.

1. The process becomes more difficult as the writer continues to revise and edit. "Tackling detail work is not fun, especially if the writer has already spent too much time drafting the document." Susan M. Taylor, Students as (Re)visionaries: Or, Revision, Revision, Revision, 21 TOURO L. REV. 265, 271 (2005).

2. "There is a point in the drafting process when the writer simply cannot read the draft 'one more time.'" Id.

3. A similar problem to editing while tired is writing while tired. "Writing done while tired is more likely to have errors that go unnoticed." Laurie Childree, How Being Tired Can Affect Your Writing, HELIUM (Dec. 7, 2008) http://www.helium.com/items/125888-writing-when-tired. Additionally, "[w]hen you are tired anything that you write makes sense to you but it might not make sense in the light of day." Id. Students face the same problem when editing as they read and re-read in attempts to perfect an appellate brief.

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What guidance can we give our students about seeing a project through to the end and putting the...