New Kid on the Hallway

Defensiveness

It's so funny, going back to school, starting a new profession, and learning to write a whole different way again. I remember seeing someone online (probably one of you lovely bloggers out there) talking about how when students have to tackle a new subject, their writing skills tend to deteriorate initially as well. That is, when you're tackling something hard and new, it's hard to write up to the level of skill you learned for another context.

I completely feel myself doing that; it's harder for me to avoid problems in legal writing that I know I routinely avoided in historical writing. But even more so, I've regressed in terms of my reaction to feedback!

I think by the time I left academia, I'd got pretty good at not taking feedback personally (or, I should qualify, not taking *reasonable* feedback personally. Petty, nasty feedback is something else entirely). I whole-heartedly subscribe to the idea that if someone reading your work makes a comment in which they appear not to "get" what you've written, what to take away from that is that your writing in that section needs to be clearer. But now that I'm working my way through a new style of writing, when people give me feedback on something - say, suggesting that I need to emphasize X - my automatic response is, "That's not what I meant! I wasn't talking about X at all!"

I may be older than many of my fellow students, but I am not older in studying the law, and I react to setbacks or criticism just like the newbie-est of new students. It's a little weird.

Score!

So, NLLDH and I went to the mall to see Up (in 3-D) (which I LOVED, especially Doug, who is pretty much the embodiment of every golden retriever I've ever known, if they could talk), and in killing time before it started, we went into Macy's, and I wandered over to the suit section - planning only on doing a little reconnaissance on suit-shopping options, because when I've looked for suits online, I've found NOTHING, so I had very low expectations, especially since department stores NEVER have anything in my size.

And there was a gorgeous brown-and-white herringbone Tahari suit. In my size. Which fit,* and looked super nice.

And the best part? It was on sale from nearly $300 to $115!!

Now I just need some job interviews in the fall to wear it to. :-P

*Where fit = the pants fit; the jacket's too big, but I knew it would be; I'll just get it tailored down (the pants need to be hemmed anyway).

The mystique of writing

undine wrote a post recently about the "one catchy magic ingredient" that makes people feel able to write, without which they feel semi-paralyzed, or at least, believe they will be semi-paralyzed. She also noted that a "highly respectd senior scholar" who was at the table during this conversation appeared slightly mystified by it, regarding writing as something you just do, without need of magic talismans.

 

My summer internship has been very interesting in this regard, because what I do all day, 5 days a week, is research and write, and what most of the other people who work here do is research and write, and yet there appears to be little mystification of that writing process. I get the sense that "writer's block" is not really a prominent concept around here. There's writing, it needs to get done, so we just do it.

 

This is not remotely meant to say, Therefore, you sucky whiny academics, you should just do it, too! It's just struck me how different the atmosphere here is about writing.

 

There are other elements of writing culture that cross over - we all write multiple drafts, we revise and polish, we all read each others stuff (that is, I get everyone to read my stuff and I read other interns' stuff; I'm not in a position to comment on what most of the other people here are doing! but you get what I mean).

 

The biggest reason for the difference, I think, is that legal writing is not your "own" writing (unless you're creating legal scholarship, which is not anyone's purpose at my current internship). I don't have to decide for myself what issues or questions to grapple with: I write about what I'm told to write about. I write about whatever conflict it is that two people or entities completely removed from my life decided was important enough to go to court about.  The parameters are set, by other people. Sure, I may discover that there are cases or statutes relevant to the case that no one else has yet brought up, either because the parties were slackers, or because my perspective is just different enough that I look for something that they didn't. But I can't decide that although the case I'm writing about deals with fraud, really it would be so much BETTER to talk about adverse possession instead.

 

And you know, right now, I really kind of like this. It's simpler. No one is going to judge me by saying that what I write isn't "important" or "relevant", because it obviously is to the parties involved, even if to no one else (and those parties probably spent a lot of money or expended other resources in order to get to the point where I'm involved). I don't have to figure out how to articulate my research questions before I even know anything about the topic. I'm sure at some point in the future it may drive me nuts to have my work driven by other people's concerns, but right now, I'm good with it.

 

It's a little bit like getting a paper assignment in school, but guess what? it's REAL.

 

(I mean, I still manage to obsess somewhat, and perhaps over-identify with my writing, but old habits die hard.)

Note to self for the next two years of school

Do NOT check your grades until they are ALL in.

My school posts grades as they come in, rather than waiting for them all to be complete, and I have learned the hard way that looking at them as they appear is a recipe for an emotional roller-coaster of the bad kind.

Last semester, I got my best grades first, and each subsequent grade was a tiny bit more depressing than the last. So I went from, *Yippeeeee, I'm awesome!!!!*, to, *Well, okay, THAT was very average*, which put a little damper on the end of my semester.

This semester, my first submitted grades were the worst, and I got so freaked out, I couldn't bring myself to look at any of the rest until last night (when they'd all been complete for a few days). I was seriously convinced that I had completely tanked my exams, that my GPA had dropped at least 10 percentage points (and that this, of course, was the END OF THE WORLD). I even made NLLDH sit next to me on the sofa when I finally checked, so he could console me and tell me he still thought I was wonderful when I got the bad news.

And of course the later grades to come in were the best grades I've got all year.

The kicker? My GPA and class rank ended up being EXACTLY THE SAME both semesters. If I'd just waited till all the grades were in and found them out all at the same time, I would have saved myself sooooooo much angst (and let's face it, there are plenty of other things I need my angst for!).*

*And by the way, I am sort of amused at the irony of me, the former professor who knows how little grades really mean, freaking out over getting low grades. I mean, it's not like I'd have been magically transformed into a stupid person if the last grades had been bad instead of good, and in the kingdom of the almighty curve, grades are really just an arbitrary way to distinguish within a group of people who are all pretty darn smart and accomplished. But even if grades are arbitrary** and stupid, employers et al. pay attention to them, which means I have to, too.

**When I say arbitrary, I don't mean that people who do well don't deserve to do well, and I'm sure some people who do badly deserve to do badly. But really, almost everyone in a given school has the ability to do just as well as everyone else, and I don't think the means by which profs rank their exams necessarily reflect students' actual ability. Now, I'm sure all students who don't get straight As say this about all classes! When your grade rides on one 3-4 hour exam at the end of a semester, though, I have to believe that it measures only limited elements of your ability.***

***And I know, I know, nothing at all I've said here about law school grades is remotely original. I promise not to rant about this at the end of every semester!

Update

So the summer continues. I'm just about done with my fourth week of work, and I'm feeling pretty good about it right now because my boss praised my work today. I'm sure at some point soon enough I'll feel confused and stupid again, but right now, it's kind of nice.

Also, the rest of the interns have shown up (I think - there might be one more yet to come), and they're all cool people I'm enjoying working with, so that's good, too. I think I have yet to master the etiquette of conversations in cubicles... there are four of us in the same room, and while we do chat on occasion (apart from asking each other questions, which we also do), I occasionally worry about being that person who won't shut up. The last time I shared an office was in grad school, where I had squatter's rights on one of a dozen desks in the big T.A. bullpen, and no one really even pretended to get work done there (beyond meeting students, that is), so I might get a little over-social sometimes. Plus, sitting in our cubicles, we communicate as disembodied voices and I can't see facial expressions and body language to read whether someone wants to keep talking or is trying to get their work done. (It amuses the admin. assistant no end to walk by the interns' room and see no one, because we're all behind cubicle walls, but hear our conversations floating through the air.) But I think it's all okay so far. 

I have to confess that the first couple of weeks were kind of hard, not because I disliked anything in particular about what I was doing, but because, honestly? Starting this job felt much more like leaving academia than starting law school did. Law school involves a new role, new people, and wrestling with a new conceptual universe, but it shares pretty much the same rhythms with my previous universe. There are whole chunks of my day open for me to dispose of as I wish. There is no one time designated for lunch. I always take work home with me. And it doesn't matter what I wear. None of these things are true about having a legal job. I think I actually had to spend a little time doing the last of my grieving for my academic career.

Of course, it didn't help that I was completing the write-on assignment for the journals at my school. (Law reviews, in which much/most legal scholarship is published, are run entirely by students. Each school has at least one, usually the Your University Name Here Law Review, which is general, and usually some other journals on specialized topics. To be part of a journal, at my school you have to "write on," that is, write a paper based on a set of sources provided by the current journal managers, as well as put citations in proper Bluebook format. For any academics out there who have complained about their field's style guide: the Bluebook is worse. Trust me.) Because my school's journal people are insane, they gave us a month to work on the write-on. (A lot of schools give you a week.) That month starts right after finals. I started working the Monday after finals, so needless to say, I did NOT spend a month working on this thing. Rather, I spent three weeks worrying about how I was not working on the write-on, and about a week truly working on it. That did NOT make for glee and cheer. But anyway, at least it's done now!

So that's what's up with me. Weekends have taken on a whole new significance and I confess I'm thrilled tomorrow is Friday. Big plans for the weekend: seeing Up, and doing lots of laundry. Just maybe I'll think of something to blog about, too.