Beyond the First Draft, Megan McAlpin (Carolina Academic Press 2d ed. 2024), 161 pages

Teaching grammar and style in the legal writing classroom is back in vogue. Grammar and style are foundational to legal rhetoric because they are part of the intentional meaning-making that is legal writing. Moreover, grammar and style come together to form the writer’s authorial voice. Developing a voice is one of the most difficult challenges for novice writers—and it is particularly difficult for those who have little experience using formal written English and those who have deep experience writing in a field that has very different audience expectations. Targeted grammar and style instruction helps students master the fundamentals, write what they mean, and do it in a way that is effective and expected in the profession. The second edition of Megan McAlpin’s Beyond the First Draft is an effective tool to teach grammar and style with a rhetorical approach.^[1]

I. Introduction

Beyond the First Draft is an excellent style manual for legal writers, novice to expert. The book teaches a wide range of advanced grammar and style choices. Significantly, it also explains why those choices are effective. In doing so, the book makes two powerful contributions to the field. First, it gives novices an effective and audience-appropriate authorial voice to use as they develop into more seasoned writers and lawyers. Second, it positions grammar and style choices as rhetorical, pushing past the traditional “drills-and-skills” approach^[2] to the higher plane of intentional meaning-making.

Grammar and style are inherently rhetorical.^[3] In her recent article Recovering Grammar, Rachel Goldberg calls for legal writing professors to resume teaching grammar in their classes.^[4] To Goldberg, “[g]rammar is foundational, constitutive of and integral to all other components of legal writing.”^[5] Goldberg isn’t calling for a return to seventh grade language arts class, focused on “language etiquette” learned through rote “drills-and-skills” exercises.^[6] Instead, she argues that legal writers should use “rhetorical grammar.”^[7] “Rhetorical grammar is ‘grammar in the service of rhetoric: grammar knowledge as a tool that enables the writer to make effective choices.’”^[8] Notably, these choices have a significant impact. Legal writers deploy grammar and style to help explain, persuade, clarify, narrow, broaden, and invite.^[9] In other words, grammar and style are foundational to logos and pathos.

Savvy legal writers don’t stop there: They use writing, and therefore grammar and style, to construct a self to present to the reader and to interact with the reader through the text.^[10] The reader draws conclusions about the author and the author’s argument on the basis of the reader’s perceptions of the writer’s constructed self.^[11] The reader develops a relationship with the writer’s constructed self through the text; the choices the writer makes can diminish or deepen that bond.^[12] In other words, grammar and style are foundational to ethos.

As its title suggests, Beyond the First Draft is an aid to the rewriting process. McAlpin opens the text with the simple observation that “[v]ery good legal writing is a product of rewriting.”^[13] Beyond the First Draft is a text for writers who want to use grammar and style with intentionality, as part of the rhetorical exercise that is legal (re)writing.

II. A Look Inside

One of the best things about Beyond the First Draft is that McAlpin organizes it around concepts instead of commas. As a result, the book presents a coherent instructional narrative grounded in the “why” behind writing choices; it does not read like a dry technical manual listing grammar rules. The five chapters of the book each tackle a fundamental process or objective of legal writing: (1) Writing and Rewriting, (2) Coherent Writing, (3) Vigorous Writing, (4) Clear Writing, and (5) Polished Writing. Instead of diving directly into the mechanics right away, each chapter opens by explaining why the objective is important and how the chapter’s material will help the writer meet the objective.

The progression of chapters follows an efficient re-writing process, moving from the big picture to the small details. McAlpin begins by situating grammar and style in the context of legal writing today. She then addresses the blended structural-stylistic skill of coherent writing, showing how to link concepts throughout a document. She then moves to vigorous writing, which teaches her readers what an authoritative and confident voice looks like in legal writing, and how to develop one. From there, she focuses more narrowly on clarity at the word choice level. McAlpin finishes with polished writing, tackling grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

The chapters each follow an accessible organization. As noted above, they each open with the why. They then provide an editing checklist that serves as a bird’s eye view of the chapter’s content. After the bird’s eye view, the chapters turn to the core instructional content. McAlpin supplements the explanatory text with clear examples and break-out boxes with writing tips. Seasoned legal writing professors will recognize the tips from years of student conferencing—like if you’re struggling to write an introduction, take a look at your conclusion.^[14] Or put your topic sentences into their own outline, and ensure that a fresh reader can understand your argument with only your topic sentences.^[15] Each chapter concludes with exercises to permit readers to practice their new skills.

A. Language and Rewriting in Context (Introduction and Chapter 1)

The biggest change from the first edition to the second is that McAlpin employs an explicitly inclusive contextual frame. In the introduction to the second edition, McAlpin explains that the strategies in the book are aimed at formal written English, which is “simply one version of the English language. It isn’t the best version or the true version. It’s just one version.”^[16] McAlpin situates writing with formal written English squarely among the skills that legal writers can develop—and, in so doing, she robs it of its power as an identity marker that reveals who inherently belongs and who doesn’t. This context is particularly powerful for students who grew up communicating in dialects, sociolects, or languages that differ from formal written English.

McAlpin emphasizes that language evolves, and she acknowledges that written language often lags behind the spoken word. For example, Americans have long used the singular they in spoken English to refer to generic nouns.^[17] In recent years, Americans have shifted to using they to refer both to a person whose pronouns the speaker does not know and to a person who uses they as their pronoun.^[18] In line with this shift, McAlpin identifies the most important substantive change from the first edition to the second: Her express endorsement of the singular they in formal legal writing.^[19]

After contextualizing language in the Introduction, McAlpin contextualizes the specific place that her text occupies in the legal writing process: Rewriting.^[20] Technically, McAlpin didn’t need a chapter to make this simple point. But her choice to make rewriting the topic of the first chapter was a shrewd one because McAlpin is pushing legal writers to embrace an extremely difficult cultural shift. Many law students enter law school with a habit of writing one draft, polishing it, and submitting it. And many derived a sense of validation from how little they changed from the first draft to the final product. As a result, getting students to develop the habit of rewriting doesn’t simply pose the typical difficulty that comes with establishing new habits. For some students, developing the habit of rewriting feels like a threat to their identity as “good” writers. McAlpin opens with pithy quotes from James Michner, John Irving, and Anne Lamott about rewriting to show that the best writers are rewriters. She then explains the importance of rewriting, and she breaks down the step-by-step process that her text will guide the reader through.

McAlpin’s frame deftly reinforces the conversations that we’re having (or should be having) with our classes now about the evolution of language, the value of inclusion, and the role of re-writing in legal writing.

B. Coherent Writing (Chapter 2)

Having set the scene, McAlpin first tackles the blended structural-stylistic skill of coherent writing. As noted above, instead of diving into the mechanics right away, McAlpin focuses first on the why: Here, the why is audience awareness and reader management. McAlpin acknowledges the writer’s hard work in creating logical organization in the first draft.^[21] She then presses writers to move away from a self-centered appraisal of their writing to an audience-centered appraisal. “You must go beyond the first draft to turn a draft that feels organized to you into a final product that your reader will perceive as organized.”^[22] To achieve the perception of organization, the writing must include clear introductions and transitions to guide the reader through the document.^[23]

McAlpin explains that effective legal writers use introductions because “we understand information best if we are able to grasp its significance as soon as we read it.”^[24] The introduction is essentially a roadmap.^[25] McAlpin guides her readers through checking for maps at the beginning of the major sections, followed by the beginning of each new legal analysis or argument, followed by the beginning of each paragraph.^[26] McAlpin points out where these introductions might fit into the nomenclature of a first-year legal writing class.^[27]

While introductions “will help your reader get started,”^[28] transitions keep “your reader from stumbling along the way.”^[29] In other words,^[30] transitions “will help your reader feel confident that they’re headed in the right direction.”^[31] McAlpin differentiates between explicit and substantive transitions, and she equips her readers to use them. Explicit transitions act as road signs for the reader; substantive transitions are conceptual bridges between what the reader just read and what the reader is about to encounter.^[32] With an eye towards reader experience, McAlpin suggests using a blend of transitions to promote a fluid reading experience.^[33]

The chapter closes with sage advice: If a writer is struggling to create coherence, then the problem might actually be the document’s underlying organization. When the quest for coherence reveals more foundational organizational challenges, “you’ll be doing yourself and your busy reader a favor” by engaging with those challenges instead of glossing over them in a race to the finish line.^[34]

C. Vigorous Writing (Chapter 3)

Once the writer creates coherence, the next step in the rewriting process is to ensure that the writing is vigorous. McAlpin explains that legal writing can be “hard to read because it lacks vigor. It sits stagnant on the page, and only through sheer force of will can you make your way through the muck and understand what is important.”^[35] Vigorous writing “jumps off the page and can pull even a reluctant reader along with it.”^[36] Writing with vigor transforms the reader’s experience from swimming upstream through muck to swimming downstream on a friendly current. What McAlpin doesn’t share are the benefits vigorous writing provides the writer: Writing with vigor promotes clarity of thought and depth of understanding for the writer as well. As a result, this is the most important chapter of the book for truly novice legal writers.

Creating the friendly downstream current requires three tasks: using concrete subjects and strong, active verbs; writing uncluttered sentences; and omitting surplus words.^[37] Even as the text tackles core grammar concepts, it stays away from the drills-and-skills approach, maintaining the focus on serving the reader’s needs. As a result, the underlying grammatical terms (noun, verb, subject, etc.) are explained in breakout boxes.^[38] The breakout boxes provide necessary instruction while letting the main text focus on the why and how of vigorous writing.

McAlpin encourages writers to identify abstract nouns at the beginning of sentences, and to consider replacing abstract nouns with concrete ones.^[39] Instead of declaring a blanket prohibition, writers should consider the audience’s needs in choosing what kind of noun to use. Most of the time, concrete nouns will provide needed clarity; sometimes, however, the audience doesn’t need the clarity of the concrete and benefits from the flow that the abstract noun provides.^[40]

McAlpin explains vague verbs and shows writers how to avoid them. She includes a chart of usual suspects, like “concerns,” “involves,” “deals with,” etc.^[41] The chart does not purport to be exhaustive, but I hope that in the third edition of the book she will include my students’ all-time favorite: “considers.”

The final segments on using concrete subjects and strong, active verbs address passive voice and nominalizations.^[42] McAlpin explains clearly what each is with the help of examples that juxtapose passive with active voice and nominalizations with concrete verbs.^[43] The juxtapositions are particularly helpful for students struggling to grasp the underlying grammatical concepts. Finally, again embracing a rhetorical approach, McAlpin demonstrates the strategic decision-making a writer might use in determining whether to use passive voice or a nominalization.^[44]

After the writer checks for concrete subjects and strong, active verbs, the next task in the rewriting process is to write uncluttered sentences. Sentences are cluttered when they contain too many ideas or unnecessary information.^[45] When these sentences are “stripped to their essentials,” the reader has a clearer picture of what the writer is trying to say.^[46]

The first step in writing uncluttered sentences is simply checking for overly long sentences and breaking them up. McAlpin recommends revision when a writer’s “sentences are consistently longer than 25 words.”^[47] While I usually advise my students to follow McAlpin’s advice to the letter, here we part ways. “Consistently longer than 25 words” is too permissive to make meaningful difference in novice writing. Beginning legal writers tend to default to overly long sentences. To them, 25+ word sentences are normal, and they resist shortening their sentences. Moreover, the vast majority of 25+ word sentences written by novice writers are difficult to follow. Therefore, prompting revision only upon a consistent track record of 25+ word sentences is too little. My instruction to my students is to revise all sentences longer than 23 words. They can do so in the ways that McAlpin advises, through breaking an offending sentence into shorter sentences or finding hard stops within a sentence to give the reader’s brain a break (like a numbered list or a properly used semicolon).^[48]

Once the writer has regulation-length sentences, McAlpin recommends final steps of decluttering: checking for too many independent clauses, too many dependent clauses, and too many prepositional phrases, as well as omitting surplus words.^[49] McAlpin is right that following these steps will declutter sentences, but the list feels daunting. Taking a more aggressive approach to sentence length tends to solve most of the problems caused by too many independent clauses, too many dependent clauses, and too many prepositional phrases. For an overwhelmed novice writer, I might pair an aggressive approach to sentence length with omitting surplus words and leave the clauses and phrases for another day.

D. Clear Writing (Chapter 4)

Once the document is both coherent and vigorous, it’s time to ensure clarity of expression. “Clear writing won’t throw up barriers or lay down speed bumps. It won’t send your reader running for a dictionary or puzzling over your meaning.”^[50] With this opening, McAlpin slays the toxic suspicion at the back of the not-yet-confident novice writer’s mind: The more difficult my writing is to follow, the more lawyerly it is, right? Wrong. McAlpin explicitly tells writers to avoid “pompous language,” i.e., language that we use to make ourselves sound smart.^[51]

McAlpin begins with rhetorical context, encouraging writers to check that their language is clear to their audience, noting that a client letter will require different choices than a motion.^[52] As a result, she encourages writers to consider whether they are using jargon or terms of art, and she guides them through the decision whether to revise and, if so, how.^[53]

After starting with audience-appropriate choices, McAlpin tackles the most common technical clarity killers in legal writing. For example, she walks through the most frequent word choice errors and explains how to use the words properly (hold/find/conclude, affect/effect, number/amount, fewer/less, many/much, like/as, since/because, if/whether, etc.).^[54] She provides instruction on how to use pronouns properly, including the singular they.^[55]

The most helpful part of this chapter for my students is the section on checking to see if subjects and verbs are close together. McAlpin frames the section with the why: “[A] reader can’t comprehend a sentence until they have read both the subject and the verb. They just can’t, no matter how much you might want them to.”^[56] Knowing the why makes the mechanics easier to grasp and less annoying to execute.

E. Polished Writing (Chapter 5)

The book concludes with a chapter on polishing, the final step in the re-writing process. McAlpin takes this opportunity to address some of the remaining common grammatical errors that legal writers make, using a checklist approach. Her checklist is not comprehensive; instead, it includes the most common grammatical errors that novice writers make, and experienced readers notice. As a result, it feels manageable. She begins with sentence fragments, parallel structure, and verb tense.^[57] She then moves on to spelling and punctuation.^[58]

III. Conclusion

Beyond the First Draft is a strong advanced style text for legal writers. Cover to cover, it fits very easily in the context of an upper-level writing class. It also fits well in the context of a first-year writing class so long as the professor is willing to tailor it to the students’ emerging needs. Working through the text cover to cover could overwhelm first-semester students, but they would benefit tremendously from, for example, the chapter on vigorous writing partway through the first semester. By their second semester, the students would be ready for the entire book.

McAlpin’s rhetorical approach to style is effective, and her instruction on vigorous writing in particular is a gift to students who are struggling to find an effective authorial voice.