Greig Henderson has proven that English graduates can put their effective writing skills to use helping judges and lawyers improve their judgment and brief writing.
An associate professor in the Department of English, Henderson teaches Canadian judges and lawyers the value of storytelling in writing judgments and briefs. Along with his colleagues, he conducts seminars and workshops in Canada that help recent legal graduates improve the succinctness of their writing.
“Judgements can be like short stories with logical demonstrations of characters, a plot, and a climax,” said Henderson, who predominately teaches rhetoric and critical theory. He believes there is a need for seminars mainly because professional prose is so jargon-ridden that it can be difficult to understand the issues. Not only does this obscurity detract from strengthening arguments, but so do the amount of details and lack of context.
The demand is also present for businesses wanting employees to be able to write short and effective memoranda. Firms and businesses want employees to have critical interpretative skills and flexible analytical skills.
“Effective writing takes away abstractions and keeps the grammatical core intact. Keep the subject, verb, and object together to make the sentence easy to understand, and add modifiers at end or beginning of the sentence,” said Henderson. “This is not to say that you should use plain prose, because a certain elevation is necessary, but use plain style with regard to the grammatical core.”
The importance of effective writing is clear when lawyers in the Ontario Court of Appeal only have 20 minutes to make their case and answer questions orally. That is when effective writing can make for winning factums because the lawyer will use focused writing and ask the judge to decide by the first paragraph, rather than flooding the page with every argument possible. Judges also participate in writing programs because of their need to provide sufficient reasoning for judgements to the public, using both simplification and gender-neutral language.
Henderson also advises students to place context before details; manage transitions by foreshadowing; and also keep in mind the reader, appealing specifically to ethos, pathos, and logos.
Professor Henderson encourages students interested in this career option to pursue a background in rhetoric and composition. In particular, an undergraduate course on law and literature may be available next year and Innis College offers a minor in the Writing and Rhetoric Program. At a graduate level, Professor Henderson teaches a master’s course on law as literature, and a joint law and english program is available.
