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By Antonette Barilla*
Law schools, focused as they are on providing intense, specialized, professional training, might legitimately be accused of stifling the creativity and innovation that define brilliant writing. When it comes to law school writing, there are blueprints for nearly every type of composition—from case briefing and exam writing, to the design of legal memoranda and the outline for an oral argument. And while professors are experts at teaching students the requisite formulas, we, as practitioners and legal writing professionals, are not as adept at facilitating the development of good writing—writing that is unfettered by artificial legal formulas. We forget that anytime one writes, even in a personal capacity, they provide some measure into their competence as a professional. The intended audience of a letter to the editor, a blog post, holiday cards, hotel reviews, business proposals, letters to friends, etc. will develop an opinion about the writer’s skill, cleverness, values, and identity. Each time a law student or attorney commits his or her thoughts to words, they open their professional reputation to some level of evaluation.