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A place for Writing 12 students to read each other's writing, to critique, to suggest, to improve.
About Me
- Brad
- Former adult teacher who loves island beaches. Happy homebody and family man; once devoted dog owner, now without Tashi, my Tibetan Terrier. I prefer the absurdity of the imagination to the absurdity of imagining nothing.
2 comments:
I've revised an essay I did 12 years ago, titled "Solving the Mysteries of Writing." My edit took the essay from 735 words down to 556. I've kept a track changes copy and will bring it to class for us to look at (and decide why I made changes in various places). After we work with it, I'll republish the much improved result. I realized that the past dozen years have taught me a great deal about the craft of writing.
Studying laws and having fun with them
Studying laws can be stressful and difficult to some students, but watching Law TV series is a different thing. For those of you who are struggling in case study and terminology of Laws, I suggest you to watch two TV series: one is called Boston Legal; the other is called The Good Wife.
Both are kind of fun for watching. Not only that, I found it also helps your listening improvement and debating skills. More than these, the cases in the series are most contemporary. You will watch cases about high school policy, credit card fraud, nuclear pollution, race discrimination, and even murder cases. The closings in the trials are very inspiring and enlightening. I bet you will borrow some ideas and use them in your persuasive essay, and that will impress your teachers. This TV watching is like getting 3 birds with one stone, so why not try it?
Besides the interesting cases, there are also distinct characters. For example, Boston Legal (5 seasons, all finished) is the story of a Law firm, in which there are some excellent lawyers such as Danny Crane and Allen Shore—two best friends with complementary traits. Danny Crane, the older guy, is a radical republican, who is famous for never losing a case, also is notorious as a randy man; Allen Shore, on the opposite, is a cynical middle age man, who is often scornful of power, but famous for winning knotty cases, especially notorious for his long-winded closing speeches which often emotionally bully jury’s mind at last moment. It is interesting to find that every invincible lawyer has his or her own emotional and mental weakness. However, they live with their weakness or what so-called weirdness and still make a good lawyer.
If you just think practicing law is all about justice, you are wrong; it can be something else. The Good Wife(now in season 2) will show you the ugly truth of legal business. You will see that office politics is common at the law firms: senior partners scheming against each other; junior lawyers advancing their career by stepping on others. Not to mention law suits are sometimes not for justice but for winning, which means money. And you will see some back-door deals within politicians. But don’t get upset by seeing this ugly dirty business, because you will meet the good wife, Alicia, a full time mom before her husband(a state attorney running in an election) was jailed for his sex and corruption scandal. She rejoins a law firm to support her family. I see Alicia as a tough and wounded woman. she has both a snail’s and a fighter’s characters. Starting over as a junior associate, she bears the cynical comments with her deliberation and perseverance; dealing with tough cases, she fights for them with a passionate and rational mind.
I can’t tell you more about those series. Otherwise, it will ruin your pleasure of watching. It is up to you to watch them either from TV channel or from Internet. It will be quite entertaining--I give you my words.
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