Dear Student,
Welcome to The Law School Playbook! I’m Halle Hara, a professor of academic success and personal skills coach to law students and attorneys. I’m glad you’re here! Who says law school doesn’t foster creativity? To the contrary, an effective reading strategy involves visualizing or using imagery to picture what is being described in your law school text.
Cognitive scientist and reading expert Maryanne Wolf explains that deep reading takes place when a reader has the capacity and is willing to formulate images while engaging with the text. This is another reading strategy that doesn’t take any additional time but has profound benefits on your engagement.
Imagine opening your text and seeing the judge rendering the decision. Imagine the reaction of counsel and the clients as they hear it. Visualize the facts as the judge tells them. Make the binding precedent come to life.
I’ve heard experts say that reading is similar to drawing in another way. Strategies like placing the case in context, reading the ending first, and scanning for key words are like drawing an outline of an image. Here, we’ll picture the outline of a house. With knowledge of what the outline looks like, we can then engage with the text to fill in the important details such as the windows, the doors, or the blooming flower boxes showing signs of spring. Having the outline saves us from blindly working through the text and wondering what the final picture will be. And it certainly saves us time.
In her book Reader, Come Home, Wolf uses an often cited example attributed to Ernest Hemmingway to discuss visualization. Incidentally, there is some debate about whether Hemmingway actually wrote it and even about what it means, but we’ll leave that for another day. The example is a six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” These words create an instant and tragic visual which allows us to infer what happened based on our background knowledge.
So what does this have to do with your law school learning? Tapping into your inner artist to visualize a case is just another play in the law school playbook to keep you focused on the task of reading. Data shows that this increased focus gives rise to greater understanding and assists with retrieval, particularly because it makes reading a multisensory learning experience. Why not give it a try and see if works for you?
If would you like to read this episode, get suggestions for further reading, or to request individual coaching with me, please visit my website at www.lawschoolplaybook.com.
As always, do your best, and I’ll be rooting for you!
References and Further Reading
Leah M. Christensen, Legal Reading and Success in Law School: An Empirical Study, 30 Seattle U. L. Rev. 603, 636–640 (2007).
Michael Hunter Schwartz, Expert Learning for Law Students 97–98 (2d ed. 2008).
Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World 40–42, 203 (2018).