The Need for a Legal-Writing Course in the South African LLB Curriculum

Swanepoel, Neels

doi:10.17159/obiter.v33i1.12184

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…are attempting to develop student writing (for example,Swanepoel and Snyman-van Deventer 2012; Clarence, Albertus and Mwabene: 2013;Broodryk 2014 Broodryk , 2015Crocker 2018;Gottlieb and Greenbaum 2018;Snyman-van Deventer and van Niekerk 2018;Bangeni and Greenbaum 2019; and Crocker 2020, 2021).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reimagining Writing Centres Practices: A South African Perspective

Hotson,

Bell,

Rambiritch

et al. 2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In light of the changing face and internationalisation of our student body and their concomitant needs, this book attempts to foreground both the strides made in the field, as well as the important questions and debates confronting writing centre practitioners in the South African higher education arena. The latter demands that we review and reimagine the support we currently provide. Reimaging, however, forces us to wrestle with the challenges that are inherent in work of this nature and to be vocal about the difficult questions that must be asked and answered if we want to provide socially just solutions to our students’ writing challenges. The onset of COVID-19 also imposed on our daily practices and required a hasty re-evaluation of our service provision. The aim of this volume is to further conversations and research on the notion of the internationalisation of writing centres and the necessity to focus on the key issues of multilingualism, discipline-based writing, social justice, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as specialised consultant/tutor training. Writing centres at South African universities have established themselves as fundamental to the support and development of our students. Thus, the time is ripe for us as writing centre practitioners in the South African context to continue writing our own writing centre narrative, grapple with context-specific issues and questions, and provide context-specific answers and solutions that speak to the lived realities of our students. We hope to achieve this through this book.

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reimagining Writing Centres Practices: A South African Perspective

Hotson,

Bell,

Rambiritch

et al. 2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Facing the Challenge of Improving the Legal Writing Skills of Educationally Disadvantaged Law Students in a South African Law School

Crocker

2018

PER

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Many first-year students in the School of Law at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Howard College, who have been disadvantaged by a poor primary and secondary education, exhibit poor legal writing skills. Over a period of four years, in order to address this urgent need for legal writing instruction, the School of Law introduced two successive legal writing interventions. The first intervention was the Concise Writing Programme, followed by the Integrated Skills in Context Programme. The Concise Writing Programme focused on English writing skills and grammar in the hope that first-year law students would be able to transfer these generic writing skills to the more specific legal discourse within which they were learning to operate. The Law School reviewed the success of this initial programme and found that students who took part in the programme not only lacked the motivation to learn generic English writing skills, but that they also did not find it easy to transfer these skills to the more specific legal writing environment. The Law School then implemented a second legal writing intervention -The Integrated Skills in Context Programme. This programme acknowledged the fact that legal writing has a multi-faceted nature, encompassing legal analysis and application, as well as logical sequencing and argument, all of which could not be taught in a vacuum, particularly when most of the student base was largely unfamiliar with any form of legal discourse and many had English as a second language. This paper recognises that there is no silver bullet to improving the legal writing skills of these students. The reality is that it will take hard work as well as financial incentives to make a difference to these students' legal writing skills. Our students need intensive one-on-one attention by qualified academics, and this means that those doing the instruction must be recognised and adequately compensated.

show abstract

The Need for a Legal-Writing Course in the South African LLB Curriculum

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Reimagining Writing Centres Practices: A South African Perspective

Reimagining Writing Centres Practices: A South African Perspective

Facing the Challenge of Improving the Legal Writing Skills of Educationally Disadvantaged Law Students in a South African Law School

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About