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! Some people say that talking to yourself means you’re crazy. Other people say that talking to themselves is the only way they can have an intelligent conversation. In this coaching session, I will explain how, jokes aside, talking to yourself as you read really does give rise to an intelligent conversation.
The best students talk to themselves about their case hypothesis. They predict how the case will be decided and why, and engage in a dialogue with themselves as that they monitor, revisit, and revise their prediction as they read along. Study after study has shown that expert readers move back and forth throughout an opinion as they endeavor to answer their own questions. As Professor Michael J. Motta has said, “when it comes to learning . . . beginning-to-end is the wrong way to read.”
Engaging in an internal dialogue as you read a text mirrors the Socratic method of teaching we use in law school—it is a dialogue designed to discover meaning and a deeper understanding than the text alone can provide. Law schools don’t just use this method because they always have; rather, it is a proven learning strategy.
Learning researchers use a slightly more formal term to describe talking to yourself. They call it self-explaining. A study cited in the Harvard Business Review demonstrated that people who use self-explaining learn almost three times more than those who don’t. So how would you self-explain in practical terms?
You would constantly query yourself as you read through the assigned texts. You might ask questions like:
What does that mean?
Why does it matter?
What do I already know relevant to this topic?
How does what I read fit together with what I know?
What about this is confusing?
What is the takeaway that I should be aware of?
Asking and answering such questions prompts readers to pause and look beyond the text to focus on the bigger picture. In sum, it prompts the reader to make important connections.
If asking and answering questions does not appeal to you, consider an alternate way of self-explaining: summarizing. Summarizing, or putting information into your own words, also promotes learning. If you summarize as you move backward and forward through a case, you will learn and retain more.
Perhaps this talking to yourself isn’t a strategy you’ll want to employ in a crowded coffee shop or on public transportation, but it is an important reading strategy that is critical to learning. And if you do try this in public and someone looks at you funny, you might say “Of course I talk to myself, sometimes I need a professional opinion.”
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
Ulrich Boser, Talking to Yourself (Out Loud) Can Help You Learn, Harvard Business Review (May 31, 2019). https://hbr.org/2017/05/talking-to-yourself-out-loud-can-help-you-learn.
Leah M. Christensen, Legal Reading and Success in Law School: An Empirical Study, 30 Seattle U. L. Rev. 603 (2007).
Ruth Ann McKinney, Reading Like a Lawyer: Time-Saving Strategies for Reading Law Like an Expert 62–63 (2d ed. 2012).
Michael J. Motta, Reading to Learn: Why You Shouldn’t Read Beginning to End and What to do Instead, Medium (Sept. 11, 2017). https://medium.com/the-mission/reading-to-learn-why-you-shouldnt-read-beginning-to-end-and-what-to-do-instead-4ab613e9a41d.
Michael Hunter Schwartz, Expert Learning for Law Students 95–103 (2d ed. 2008).