Tips for undergraduates on writing, learning, and life

Here are some practical writing tips that are equally useful for nonlawyers, and a handout I distribute whenever I get a chance to present to college students.

Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024) is available on Amazon and Audible. Please help me sustain its momentum by giving it a five-star rating, following me on LinkedIn, and sharing my posts with your network.

I’ve been a teacher even longer than an attorney: before law school, I obtained an M.A. in Education at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and taught high school history. Since then, I’ve taught advanced legal writing courses at two law schools and given many talks about writing and argumentation to law firms, bar associations, and government agencies.

I especially love opportunities to speak with undergraduates and share tips I wish I had learned earlier, along with more general advice about life and learning. I had that opportunity yesterday when Prof. Adam Sechooler invited me to give a guest presentation to his undergraduate students in a comparative law course at the University of Southern California. The slideshow I used is linked below. Although the examples come from litigation documents, the strategies described apply to most professional or academic writing. I included a handful of easily implemented tips relating to the writing process, organization, sentence construction, and concision:

Ryan McCarl, Writing Tips for Undergraduates (2025-02-19 presentation)

1.59MB ∙ PDF file

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Here are the slides from a presentation I gave to undergraduate students at the University of Southern California. Although the examples come from litigation documents, the strategies — like those taught in Elegant Legal Writing — apply to most professional or academic writing.

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I also distributed the handout below, which I update and circulate it whenever I present to college students. It contains book and software recommendations along with advice about life, learning, and preparing for law school:

Ryan McCarl, Some Tips for Pre-Law Students and Other Undergraduates (2025-02-19)

392KB ∙ PDF file

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Here’s a handout I distribute whenever I have a chance to speak with college students. It contains book and software recommendations along with advice about life, learning, and preparing for law school.

Download

Most tips in Elegant Legal Writing apply to all nonliterary writing — I’ve even heard of the book being assigned in college composition courses. While researching for the book, I read many style guides without limiting myself to those focused on legal writing. One of my goals in writing ELW was to synthesize the most effective and useful ideas from these sources, illustrate them with examples from litigation filings, and teach them painlessly through a book that is pleasant to read.

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Ryan McCarl is the author of Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024) and a founding partner of business litigation firm Rushing McCarl LLP. For more tips about writing and argument, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing newsletter and follow Ryan on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is available on Amazon and Audible.

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