You sometimes hear that writing “can’t be taught.” The statement has some truth in it: because writing is a complex integration of thought and technique, no teacher can supervise you while you do it. As a field of practical application, it requires doing. Only when you actually write can you apply whatever theories you might have learned.
Yet an effective teacher can explain the universals of good writing and suggest methods of thinking and practicing that will enable you to write well. It’s not that you’ll wake up one day with a talent for framing legal issues. But you can acquire the skill if you know some good rules for issue-framing. These rules, by the way, typically involve a lot of “unlearning” because the usual methods taught in law schools tend to create obscurity, not clarity.
And if you learn to frame issues effectively—so that any reader immediately understands the problem and how it arises, all before leaving page 1—you’re halfway home. That involves a variety of learnable techniques that Professor Bryan A. Garner teaches. Every day, he shows that writing can indeed be taught.