The Dreaded Memo

So it's 1L Memo writing season across the country. Imagine it like this: take your most dreaded seminar paper you ever wrote, add in your most dreaded manuscript you ever wrote, add a dash of a horrid topic and whamo, you have the Memo. It's the "term paper" for all 1Ls, that one little piece of writing that we all dread and will probably loathe even long after we've turned it in. Why is it so bad? Because it brings out all of our insecurities about legal writing. Sure, we've spent the semester doing various attempts at writing a good memo, but those weren't graded. This one, this one little Memo, determines our entire grade for legal writing and with it, a lot of other things. If you aren't good at legal writing, employers are going to notice. If you aren't good at legal writing, it's going to be hard to make Law Review or to give employers a good writing sample. A class that is just 1.5 credits basically becomes the class every 1L loves to hate. You can can feel it in the air, you can hear it in the way people talk-- the memo is the real unknown, the real thing that will shake the confidence of even the most overly-confident 1Ls... it's what will level the playing field. It's the one thing that everyone has heard about and everyone fears.

Too dramatic of wording for a simple paper? Come visit a group of 1Ls here right now and you'll see. In the meantime, I am going to go bang my head against my laptop and stare at the blinking cursor, which is calmly beating at 82 blinks a minute.