The Writing Process for my Exploratory Essay

When I started to brainstorm ideas for my exploratory essay, I immediately focused on my future career and what type of work I am interested in doing after graduation. Since I have always been interested in becoming a lawyer, I began to think about how lawyers function as professional writers and how big of a role writing plays in their daily lives. I soon realized that I knew very little about what actually went on in a law firm and what types of procedures lawyers use when researching cases and defending clients. Therefore, I decided to research the occupation and explore lawyers as professional writers. I sorted through many different articles in search of an explanation of lawyers’ writing methods. Although I found several articles about lawyers and their work, I realized that few of these articles were related to professional writing. After discovering that there were few resources available on lawyers and their writing, I became increasingly interested in exploring the writing processes within a law firm first hand.

I then decided to focus my paper on the work of lawyers in order to gain a better understanding of legal writing. Since I only found a few online articles about the writing of lawyers, I decided to review the class reading assignments and decide if any of these exerts were relevant to my essay. When looking through the book Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, I was reminded of Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric. I decided that Aristotle’s view of rhetoric as “the power of finding the available arguments suited to a given situation” was an interesting approach to the type of writing lawyers compose. Therefore, I decided to include this definition in my essay and use it to expand on how lawyers use words to form arguments. I also incorporated other sources from my research into my paper and purposed questions that I am interested in exploring through my observations. I described what I would do while in the law firm to make the most of my time and gain the greatest amount of information for my final project.

Although I suggested various questions about the legal profession and the function of writing within this occupation, I did not attempt to answer these questions. Instead, I described the process I would go through to explore possible answers and eventually form conclusions. I ended my essay by explaining why it is necessary to investigate the writing processes that take place in the legal sector and how lawyers use written documents in their cases. This explanation will help to keep me motivated and remind me of my goals while visiting the law firm and arranging my project. I also feel that this edition helped to clarify my essay by giving my project purpose.