Using Feedback to Improve Writing and Writers

• Author: David J. S. Ziff
• Pages: 49-53

Published in Litigation, Volume 47, Number 3, Spring 2021. © 2021 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be

copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association. 49

Show Them the Way

Using Feedback to Improve

Writing and Writers

DAVID J. S. ZIFF

The author is an associate teaching professor at the University of Washington School of Law, Seattle.

In his baseball memoir Ball Four, former New York Yankees

pitcher Jim Bouton tells a story about Yogi Berra. Berra, an all-

time great, was taking batting practice with some of the other

Yankees hitters. As the mortals sat and watched, Berra tried to

impart some hitting wisdom. It didn’t work. Either Berra wasn’t

clear or they just couldn’t understand. The lesson ended with

Berra grabbing a bat and yelling, “Just watch me do it.”

In Bouton’s view, that breakdown in communication wasn’t

anyone’s fault. Berra was just too good, too experienced, and

therefore too instinctual. He couldn’t explain how to do what

he was doing. He just did it.

If you often find yourself revising work product by recent law

school graduates or summer interns, you might identify with

Berra’s plight. A junior attorney gives you a draft that doesn’t

work. You explain the problems and ask your inexperienced col

-

league to revise and resubmit it. The next draft falls short again.

You repeat that process, perhaps a few times. In the end, you take

the document and rewrite large portions of it yourself, as if to

say, “Just watch me do it.”

Sound familiar?

We can’t avoid editing junior attorneys’ writing. It’s part of

our profession. But we can make the process more effective. In

the short term, of course, we want the particular brief or letter

or discovery request to be the best it can be. Over the longer

term, though, we want junior attorneys’ writing to improve as

quickly as possible so we can spend less time editing their work

and more time on the rest of our practices.

To accelerate that transition, do more than just show the junior

attorney your finished product. That sort of “Just watch me do

it” feedback puts too much emphasis on the result and too little

emphasis on the process. It’s as if we opened a cookbook and the

recipe page showed a picture of a beautifully frosted cake with

only these directions: “Make this cake.”

That recipe would fail for the same reason that simply doing

the rewriting fails. Both the novice chef and the novice lawyer

likely understand that the final iteration is better than their own

initial effort. But they haven’t learned how to achieve excellence

on their own. The next time they bake a cake or write a brief,

they’ll have to return to the expert for more help.

We’re always surprised and perplexed when our new hires

struggle with simple writing tasks. After all, we hired them

because they had good references, excelled in law school, and

submitted good writing samples. How could the same per-

son who crafted that well-structured and well-reasoned moot

court brief now make so many mistakes in a draft summary

judgment motion?

One possible reason: Even the best law students are novice at-

torneys. And novices often have difficulty transferring skills from