Allison Christians, the H. Heward Stikeman chair in Tax Law at McGill University, tells Tax Notes Executive Editor for Commentary Jasper Smith about her principles for writing good papers in law school and beyond.
This post has been edited for length and clarity.
Jasper Smith: Welcome, Allison.
Allison Christians: It is great to be here, Jasper. Thanks so much for having me.
Jasper Smith: Thank you for taking the time to talk with us today about an article you wrote recently on writing good papers in law school. As a publishing organization, and I speak for myself and the commentary team here at Tax Notes, we certainly are always interested in anything that promotes quality writing. We're excited to have you on to discuss not just specific points from the article, but writing in general.
To get started, can you tell us a little bit about what led you to write this paper on how to write good papers in law school?
Allison Christians: I actually started writing this paper about writing in response to common things I was saying over and over to students. I thought, "OK, I keep telling you the same thing. I keep saying it again. I need to explain this in writing." It's one of those things when you start, you can't stop then.
Because after the next crop of papers, you add something else to that and you add something else. Pretty soon you have almost a manifesto of rules for good writing, but it's also almost the opposite. It lays out some traps to avoid.
Jasper Smith: I know reading it myself, I was thinking, "Do I do that?" I think it goes beyond law school. For those who haven't had a chance to read it, can you give us a quick recap of the paper and highlight some main points that you want people to really hone in on?
Allison Christians: It's pretty basic. It covers style, substance, and a little bit of, "Don't do these things. These are maddening writing tics." Some of it is assurance really that you have a process. You might not realize what your process is and having some recognition of your process will help you improve it.
I just start off with a little table of contents. It gives you structure first, then substance, and then style. If you're going to only work on one thing, work on structure first. If you get structure down, then it's time to move on to the substance. Make sure that your argument is complete and accurate. Finally, the style will get that writing to the next level.
The first one is organize your argument. If that's the only thing you get through, please at least just do that. You will find that first step is the hardest. I think as you go, they get a little easier until the very end. We're talking make it aesthetically pleasing. That's easy to do relative to the first one, which is organization.
Jasper Smith: The first thing I saw as a recurring theme was keep reading your article over and over again. Then, as you do, hone in a little bit more or funnel it down into these points and get more precise and improve it with each pass.
Allison Christians: The big project of writing is communication. I really want students to understand that when you write, you're speaking ideas to the universe and you're learning as you go. What's the product of that? What are you trying to say? Unless you work on how you communicate, you can leave some very unfinished ideas in the universe.
A lot of this is just trying to teach students that the way you get to be a better writer, to be an effective communicator, is to revisit and think about the way you're putting those ideas together. Try to think of it from the perspective of the reader. The poor reader, who has to work so hard if you decide not to.
If you say, "I have so many ideas here, but I can't get it together. I can't figure out what the thread of this is. Oh, I'll just put it all in the paper and the reader will figure it out." Well, no thank you, I'm saying on behalf of readers everywhere. I'm not interested in trying to figure out what your argument was for you. That's your job as the writer. I think really that's the motivation here in all of the particular rules.
Jasper Smith: I think the underlying theme there is simplicity, right? I always remember: Omit needless words.
Allison Christians: I mean, in life, too. The harder the argument is, the more complex the idea is, the more important it is to figure out how to say it in a way that your reader can understand it so that they don't have to spend so much time parsing what you're saying. You can lead them through to the conclusion you're trying to take them to.
Don't forget: this is for law students. What is the practice of law? It's persuasion. Your goal in communicating is to be persuasive in the things you say so that people will want to agree with you. Especially judges and deciders of your fate. In tax law that can include the Internal Revenue Service or in Canada, the Canada Revenue Agency.
It could include a decision-maker that isn't ready to hear your beautifully constructed legal argument. But who isn't ready to hear you say, "Well, this is really simple. Let me make it easy for you." There's a gift to that. If you can hone your skill at that, I think you can become a really effective advocate.
Jasper Smith: To the point that you write the way you write, or you have freedom of style, obviously, if you read our publication, there are a myriad of different style and authors have a number of voices that they use. We don't try to take that away. But there's certain fundamentals that you have to master before you can start freestyling.
Allison Christians: Yes, that's true. I'm never more pleased than when I see a letter to the editor of Tax Notes International complaining about something I've written saying, "Allison is so wrong," or "I totally disagree with Allison." I'm pleased to get those because it means a person read it. They understood what I was saying enough to disagree with me, and then come back with something to say.
I need to know my audience for Tax Notes International. My audience is a different audience than the one when I'm trying to write a more general law review paper. I have to speak to them where they are and about the things that they care about. I can't dwell on things that I might spend more time on in my own writing that I think are important but isn't going to appeal to them as readers.
I have to think about that audience. Sometimes that's really hard to do. I think this is maybe the unstated rule in the paper is if you don't know how to write, then what you have to do is write. You have to write more and keep writing until you figure out, "Oh yeah, that didn't make sense at all. I wrote that to the wrong audience." Or "I didn't write that in the right way and that audience couldn't respond to it." It just takes practice.
But what does most writing really take? It's that you actually want to communicate something. You're trying to communicate something to someone else. Not because you're trying to tell them something that they don't know, but because you're trying to engage.
That's why I like those letters when they come back, because they're showing me that I have engaged with somebody. You don't have to agree with me in order to engage with me. Good writing should be able to create that space for engagement. That's the great thing about having different venues to write in.
Jasper Smith: I fully agree with that. Talking about students in general, how would you suggest they get that extra set of eyes? Is it a professor as a resource?
Allison Christians: You're a student and you've written a paper that's for a class. You usually have an audience of exactly one, which is your professor. You can be sort of screaming at the void really. As a professor, if I have 60 students in the term, the chances that I'm going to do two or three reads of every paper are pretty slim.
Most of the time when you're writing a term paper, not very many people are going to have the time, the inclination, or the ability to read it. But here's the thing that you can do to always improve your writing: You can explain that idea to somebody around the dinner table. Explain it to your family members or your friends and say, "OK, I'm writing this article. This is what I'm writing about."
As you try to formulate the words, the first time you go through that, you'll have no idea. "I don't even know what I'm writing about anymore. I lost it. I thought I knew. I have this whole paper. It's 30 pages long. I have no idea what it's even about because I can't figure out how to serve it to you verbally."
But if you do this a few more times, you will figure out what it is you were trying to say, which will help you edit yourself. You'll probably also get some good feedback in terms of how logical that argument is. You may not get substantive legal feedback, but you will certainly get, "Well, I don't get it. What are you saying?" Every time someone says "I don't get it," that's a gift to you because then you get to articulate it a different way.
If you can't get somebody to read what you're writing, grab them and tell them what you're writing about. Even after almost 17 years of teaching and writing, I still take my ideas home to the dinner table. My kids are pretty grown up now. One of them can very quickly tell me, "Oh, I don't like this idea at all." Or "Wait a minute. That doesn't make any sense to me." Then I'll have to say it a different way.
That older kid of mine is responsible for more than one of my title changes. He'll say, "Why are you giving so many long words in the title? Just call it 'blah.'" He doesn't know any more than he could possibly avoid knowing about tax, but he can still be that sounding board. Articulating your ideas always makes them better.
Jasper Smith: That's wonderful advice. We've talked several times about this article being written again as an instruction for academic papers. Do you think there would be different considerations when it comes to papers written for other purposes? Particularly, again, as lawyers, maybe briefs, legal memos, even professional publications, such as ours?
Allison Christians: I would say 90 percent of the paper is broadly applicable to anyone who writes. All writing shares that one thing in common, which is that you're trying to communicate. You're trying to engage somebody.
Think about what you're trying to say, but also, why are you trying to say it? Are you trying to sound like the smartest person in the room? Are you're trying to take up all the oxygen so nobody else can have a chance to say anything? Why do you think anybody would voluntarily subject themselves to that kind of writing? I think that goes across all forms of writing.
If I'm a judge and I'm reading your brief, I want to be persuaded that you're being careful about the things you're saying. You're not exaggerating. You're not leaving out important things. You're not trying to minimize something that shouldn't be minimized. You're taking it seriously and you're engaging. I don't want to read a brief where you're trying to take up all the oxygen and tell me how smart you are.
I think that kind of advice goes across forms of writing. It is hard work. It is a slog.
Jasper Smith: How would you respond to critics who might say long-form legal writing, especially in academic context, it's not as important as it once was?
Allison Christians: I would say, unequivocally, that's wrong. It is important. Why is it important? Here's why: Law is trying to accomplish things that are complicated, really tough. They involve balancing interests and balancing cultural, social, political, economic, normative — all kinds of aspects of life. To think that what we should do is get rid of rigorous thinking in favor of something short, Twitter-worthy, is a mistake.
It's hard work and it's boring. Sometimes the things you write are not going to be appreciated by more than one or two people. If you're lucky, five at the most. Then you have to come back out of that and say, "OK, now why was I looking at that problem? What is it about that problem that intrigued me? Why did I spend time reading through all of that stuff that only myself and I can persuade maybe one or two people to be interested in that?" You say, "OK, well actually there is a good reason I'm interested in that," and try to figure out what that is.
For me, the interest that motivates basically everything I write is the distributed impact of all of the rules that we write. The rule of law. I'm interested in how law mediates wealth distribution and how law produces wealth distribution across and within societies. All of the questions that I ask about how does this rule work are ultimately trying to work out what are the implications of that rule for people?
I think you don't get the tweets, the blogs, and the knowledge dissemination idea unless you do that deep dive long-form. Is it dead? No! It's the basis for developing nuanced thinking about difficult topics. That is the project of law.
Jasper Smith: You mentioned that it is hard. It is difficult. It does take a time commitment. Anything that is difficult and takes effort can be a differentiator for you. If it were easy, to sound cliche, everybody would do it.
Allison Christians: For sure. This is how you know you're a tax lawyer. You are the person who, when all reasonable people would say, "This question is no longer interesting. And I no longer want to know the answer to it," you keep going. That is the moment you know you've found your correct area of law to study.
In my case, it's tax. You're the one constructing the spreadsheet at three in the morning, putting the numbers in there, trying to figure out how it works. You're the one still reading through that same statute. After every reasonable person would have turned the lights off and went home, you're still there. You've got the right profession.
Is it easy? No. You and I could come up with 10 things that I could have been good at that would have been way easier than international tax, especially at the pace that it's been going in the last five years.
It's hard. A lot of it is meaningless. I really like the transfer pricing guidelines, but you try spending some time with them. It's not fun to read these things. It's not fun to sort through words that don't have any meaning independent of the context in which you find them. It's not fun to try to find principles in the middle of all that. It's hard.
But if you are still doing it when all reasonable people would have stopped, then that's what you were supposed to be doing. You know something that a lot of people don't know. Why wouldn't you want to share that knowledge with the world? Get out there and write a paper about it and see what you learn by writing.
Jasper Smith: I would say that for someone like you, who is able to do the non-fun work and then articulate it back in your articles, which are enjoyable and engaging, we appreciate that. You've added something to the world.
Allison Christians: That's the goal. Any time you sit down and start writing, you know the first thing you're going to do when you start writing is you're going to start learning. Learning is hard work. You have to focus on it. You can't just kick up your feet, look deep into a flower, and know what to say. That's not how it works. You have to put effort into learning.
When you learn, then you know something you didn't know before. You start looking around like, "Huh. Am I the only one that didn't know this? OK, that's possible." It could be that everybody knew this. I'm the only one that didn't know. But on the off chance other people didn't know either, I'm going to write this out in the way that I understand it.
The worst case scenario, the worst thing that could happen is I could be wrong. Then hopefully I will have written it in such a way where somebody will come back and tell me, "Here's the three or 10 or 100 reasons why I think you're wrong." I'm going to get a chance to think about it some more and learn a little bit more. If you're not doing that, then there's no point in writing.
Jasper Smith: Fantastic. Do you have any final comments about your article, student writing, writing in general? Anything you just wanted to add?
Allison Christians: I can say that the world of ideas is really an inspired and rare world. It's hard because it's worthwhile spending time in that world. A lot of people will try to push you out of that world. "Well, you can't do this. It's not practical." Or "It's not going to work." Or "I don't understand it. I don't like it." Or "That's not how we do things." Or "That's not how we've always done things." But the world of ideas is one in which you say, "What if we did that anyway? What does that look like?" I appreciate nothing more than seeing someone playing in that world and sharing that with me.
I love to write because I am working as much as I can in that world of ideas and I want to engage other people there. It's a great place to be. I love to see students try to jump in there. I just encourage it.
I would love to see more writing by everybody all the time. Since that's not possible, just reach out, talk through your ideas with people, and develop your voice. Because everybody that's in this business has something to contribute. Whether you can write it in a tweet or you can write it in a long-form article, I accept both forms. I love that idea that we can meet together in that world of ideas.
Jasper Smith: Thanks again, Allison, always great to talk with you and hope to speak with you again soon.
Allison Christians: It was a real pleasure. Thanks so much.