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15 Legal Writing: J. Legal Writing Inst. 241 (2009)
Writing across the Curriculum: Professional Communications and the Writing That Supports It

handle is hein.journals/jlwriins15 and id is 263 raw text is: WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM: PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION AND THE WRITING THAT SUPPORTS IT Andrea McArdle* I. INTRODUCTION As professionals-in-training, law students must become flu- ent in the written forms by which legal practitioners communi- cate information and professional analysis to and on behalf of their clients-in various documents such as client letters, law of- fice memoranda, and briefs to a court. Generated in the context of representing clients, formal law-practice-based writing should reflect an accurate understanding of a client's concerns, goals, and expectations. If we agree that formal legal writing is organic to the attor- ney-client relationship, then helping students form a writing identity that is attentive to all dimensions of that professional relationship seems critical to a law school's professionalizing mis- sion. The goal of building a client-centered writing identity, then, would be to produce writing that is rigorously precise and accu- rate, as well as clear, engaged, evocative, and humane. To that end, legal educators need strategies that speak to the multiple contexts in which lawyers engage in client-centered professional writing. At the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Association of Ameri- can Law Schools, the program for the Section on Legal Writing, Reasoning, and Research considered in depth one such strategy: the set of theories and practices known as Writing across the Cur- riculum (WAC), an educational initiative that originated in Brit- ain at the secondary school level in the 1960s, and was adapted to * Professor of Law and Director of Legal Writing, City University of New York School of Law. This essay is based on presentations given at the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Annual Meeting, Section on Legal Writing, Reasoning, and Research, New York City, New York, January 4, 2008.

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