Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [161]
Occasionally, this will mean that you'll have to redo a considerable amount of work. If, for instance, you realize that your original claim was mistaken, but you've already written a lot in defense of that claim, you might find yourself having to do some rewriting. But in my experience, such rewriting is much quicker than writing the first draft.
7. Do the editing/proofreading/bluebooking test (if there is one)
After you've chosen the claim for your paper, write down your claim and any ideas you have related to the claim. Then set the paper aside, and do your editing test, before starting to write the paper.
First, you'll probably need a break from reading and thinking about your paper topic. Alternating working on the paper and doing the test can help freshen your thinking about both.
Second, editing tests are hard. They tend to contain lots of errors for you to find, and many of the errors (especially the bluebooking ones) are carefully hidden. One good way to find such errors is to do the test from scratch several times and then merge the results. If you miss something or miscorrect something one time, you might not make the same mistake the next time.
As one student reported to me, “Every time you put down your bluebooking test and pick it up again after some time has passed, you'll find new mistakes.” I found the same when I was competing; even though I'd written and bluebooked about 50 law review articles, every time I redid the test I found things I'd missed.
For this to work, you have to have several unmarked copies of the test—that's why I suggested that you photocopy the test right after you get it. But you also have to have forgotten as much as possible about what you did the last time you did the test, or else you'll end up making the same mistakes all over again. This means you'll have to space your efforts: For instance, you might do the test once the first day, once the third day, once the fifth, and once the seventh. So don't leave the test until the very end. Begin right after you've identified your claim.
Many law reviews give you a list of correction symbols (symbols that mean “delete,” “insert,” “capitalize,” “italicize,” and the like) that you should use for marking up the editing test. The list usually contains examples of how each symbol is used. Look over the list carefully, and use the symbols precisely as you're instructed to.
A few tips for doing the editing test:
a. If the editing test consists of a bunch of footnotes that you have to check, assume that each footnote has at least one error. If you haven't found any errors in a footnote, check again. (It's possible that some footnotes in the test will be perfect; but for any particular footnote, chances are that there'll be at least one mistake.)
b. Once you've found one error, or one set of errors, don't relax. Devious test designers will often throw in some errors that fall into one genre (for instance, citation format errors) and others that fall into another (for instance, grammatical errors in the citation parenthetical). It's easy to get distracted by the first set of errors you find, and stop thinking about other kinds of errors.
Don't let that happen to you: For every footnote you check, don't stop until you've thought of all the ways that the material might be wrong. Keep a mental checklist of the various things that you need to check for each footnote—such as the signal, the case name format, the format of the rest of each citation, the accuracy of the citation, the grammar and spelling in the parentheticals, the accuracy of the parentheticals, the rules for short forms, and so on—and make sure that you check each item for each citation in each footnote.
c. Don't just check citation format, unless you are explicitly told to limit yourself to that. Also check the accuracy of each citation, the accuracy of any quotes, and the accuracy of any paraphrases of sources (for