Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [44]
How brief should these tentative discussions be? That's a judgment call; you want them to persuade the reader that there's something interesting there, but you don't want them to get long enough that they make your article unnecessarily bulky and take up too much of your time. Four tips:
1. Ask your faculty advisor for advice, but after you've handed in the rough draft of your main discussion. Before you deliver the draft, the advisor won't be sure that you're able to handle even the core claim, much less the tangents.
2. Make clear at the start of the section that these points are avenues for future research, and that you will be discussing them only briefly. People's evaluations are related to their expectations: If they are warned that the discussion will be brief, they'll be less likely to be bothered by its brevity.
3. How substantive the digressions must be turns on how substantive your core argument is. If you deal thoroughly with your main claim, readers will be more likely to assume that your tangentially raised points are interesting, and that you would have dealt with them well if your article had been more focused on them.
4. Be prepared to delete these digressions—or to save them for a future article—if readers tell you that they're unpersuasive or distracting.
Finally, note that this has to do with how broad you make your article—how many related issues you choose to cover. If you have an opportunity to make your article deeper, by better justifying more of your arguments, do so (at least unless you think your justifications will be redundant). Inadequately supported assertions, or even assertions that are supported by the doctrine but not fully defended on policy grounds, make your argument weaker.
VII. FINISHING THE FIRST DRAFT, AND THE ZEROTH DRAFT
A. Defeat Writer's Block by Skipping Around
When you're writing the first draft, and get blocked on one section, go on to the next. If you need to leave a subsection for later, that's fine. If you feel that the best you can do is outline a section, or write a few unconnected paragraphs, do that.
Just keep going forward, and don't let your difficulties with one part interrupt the whole writing project. Usually, even if you're bored with one section or confused about what you want to say, you'll be invigorated by moving to another part of your argument. And once you have the first draft done, no matter how rough it is, revising it and filling the gaps will probably be much easier.
Your producing a first draft quickly, and then quickly improving and completing it, will also give your faculty advisor more time to give you useful feedback, and maybe to read through more drafts; and it will make you look industrious and disciplined—which is how you want the person who's grading your work to see you.
B. The Zeroth Draft
One way to get a first draft done is to begin with what I call a “zeroth draft”—something halfway between an outline and a first draft. Here's one way of doing this:
1. Start by writing a fairly complete Introduction, if you can. For the reasons mentioned in Part III.A (p. 47), the Introduction can help you get a better grasp of what you're trying to say.
2. Lay out in your document the structure that you anticipate for the rough draft, including the section and subsection headings.
3. For each subsection, start by writing a sentence or two summarizing the argument in the section. For instance, if you're writing about the First Amendment and workplace harassment law, one section might read:
A. Fighting Words
Workplace harassment law can't be justified using the “fighting words” exception because it isn't limited to speech that isn't face-to-face, and isn't likely