Category: Empirical research

LWI 2018: Sessions on empirical study of legal communication

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The schedule for the Legal Writing Institute 2018 biennial conference in Milwaukee, July 11 — July 14, is published (version as of June 27), and it looks terrific, with a great focus on pedagogy and pedagogical research in the field! This blog post is about a subset of the sessions, those devoted to empirical study of legal communication.  In that category, I include any study that systematically examines some class of legal communication outside the law-school context (so, not including classroom and pedagogical research). I’m excited to see scholars pursuing such projects. I’ve made the argument in the past that Read More …

“Gender as a variable in writing studies: Ethics and methodology” at WRAB in Bogotá

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Organizers of the Writing Research Across Borders (WRAB) IV conference in Bogotá Colombia in February 2017 accepted my proposal to present a paper. I’ve paid my registration and booked my travel. I intend to have a near-final draft of a journal article ready for the conference; I hope to make a few final edits if I get good feedback there and ship it off the week after I return. I’m also looking forward to a couple days of kicking around with my spouse in Bogotá, which looks like an amazing city. Here is the abstract for my paper: Gender as Read More …

Does it matter to the legal profession and pedagogy that men and women didn’t write differently?

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I gave a talk this week at a law school regarding my article in Written Communication from October 2016, “Gender/Genre: The lack of gendered register in texts requiring genre knowledge.” The article reports the results of an empirical study, but it does so with reference to theories from corpus linguistics and relevance-theoretic pragmatics, not the sort of thing that most law faculty are interested in. Instead, I wanted to emphasize for them the implications of my study in the legal profession and pedagogy and to situate it within a conversation about gender differences more broadly. The article is one voice in a Read More …

Empirical research into legal comm’n & professional status of LRW faculty

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I was delighted to finagle an invitation to speak on a panel at the Legal Writing Institute in Portland on July 12, during the meeting of the LWI Professional Status Committee. The committee met in a plenary session with a larger audience and conducted its business, and then we panelists were asked to comment in short form (two minutes each) on an angle or issue relating to the professional status of legal research and writing faculty. (For readers outside the legal academy, teachers of communication in that field face status challenges similar to those faced by teachers of writing in the broader academy Read More …