Tabitha Martin, an Akron Law Writing Center tutor for the last two years, will be presenting her research on persuasive legal writing at The Legal Writing Institute’s Fourth Biennial Applied Legal Storytelling Conference in London (UK) this month. The conference brings together academics, practitioners, and professors to explore the role of narrative in legal writing.
Her presentation, “How Lawyers Tell Their Stories: Linguistic Strategies in Narrative Appellate Brief Writing,” grew out of both her work with Akron Law students and her studies as a Composition graduate student. “In my literary linguistics class, we discussed the techniques that fiction writers use to get readers to empathize with characters. I realized that these same techniques could be used by legal writers to create empathy for their clients.” Tabitha also developed a writing workshop last semester for the LARW students to help them learn how to apply the principles to their own Appellate Briefs for class.
“I’m looking forward to representing Akron Law at such a prestigious conference, and I thank all of the LARW professors for their help with my research, especially Prof. Cohen and Prof. Schiavone, who told me about the conference.” Tabitha will be teaching English Composition I in the Fall at UA and hopes to pursue her PhD in writing and rhetoric in 2014.