Thursday, November 15, 2012
My Preferred Writing Genres
I prefer
to write in one of two genres. The first technical genre as defined by Yagoda
would be persuasion, but more specifically I enjoy writing in the legal genre. I
also sometimes enjoy writing fiction, although I do not do it on my own and
have only written fiction pieces for classes. I think that I prefer fiction
because I enjoy reading fiction, in fact it accounts for almost all of my
recreational reading. I also think that I prefer to write in the legal genre because
it really interests me. Another reason that I think I like writing legal
documents is because I plan on using it as a career. I don’t think that the
constraints associated with fiction have really influenced the form of my
writing in a large way. I tend to be brief with my adjectives and descriptions
which, someone pointed out to me, is a technique that Stephen King employs. So that
probably influenced me subconsciously because I really enjoy his work. I would
really like to someday write a novel, but in realistic terms I think I will
most likely end up doing only legal writing in the future. As far as the legal
genre goes, they tend to talk in circles and aren't always clear on what they
are saying. Law briefs and legal opinions also like to use a lot of jargon that doesn't really mean anything to anyone outside of the law community. I deliberately
try to avoid this. I still use legal jargon that is necessary to sounding
professional in this genre, but I don’t use it excessively and I try very hard
to make my points clear in my legal writing. I would really like it if people
outside of the legal community would be able to understand most of my legal
writing. I feel that would be very useful because people outside of the law
community do often have to read law briefs, and speaking from experience it’s
really frustrating when you've read eight pages of a brief and you still have
no idea what they are saying. That has definitely consciously influenced my
legal writing.
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I like where this is going. Have you thought about showing a typical legal brief and then showing how you would rewrite it so that it still fits the genre and delivers the info, but does so in a clearer fashion?
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