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29 J. Legal Stud. Educ. v (2012)

handle is hein.journals/jlse29 and id is 1 raw text is: Editor's Corner: On Rigor and Brevity Many lament the writing skills of business students and businesspeople.' What sorts of written assignments will cultivate better writing skills? Richard Arum andJosipa Roksa address this question in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,2 an influential new book reviewed by Professors Joshua Perry and Jamie Prenkert in this issue of the Journal of Legal Studies Education (LSE). The authors of Academically Adrift advocate rigorous academic endeav- ors3 and in measuring rigor adopt a benchmark of more than twenty pages of writing in a semester-long course.4 Such writing might take the form of one or more lengthy, traditional term papers. Students whose written efforts are 'See, 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.htinl (Like a dark and stormy night, bad writing has long shadowed the business world-from bureaucratese to mangled memos to the cliche-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 cliches and garbled with gobbledegook); David Silverman, My 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.htmI (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. 31d. at 129. 41d. at 70-71. © 2012 The Author journal of Legal Studies Education © 2011 Academy of Legal Studies in Business V1

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