Learning from BriefCatch: Using Technology to Unearth Your Writing Blind Spots

“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.” 
― Dr. Seuss

The science is in: Our brains are not wired to be good editors. It’s not just that we get bored and stop paying attention (although we do). It’s not just that writing and editing are hard (although they are). It’s that on the most basic level, our mind doesn’t want to find problems with our writing. We wrote the stuff—why would we want to change it?

Researchers have looked at editing a lot. And there are probably several reasons we are bad at it.

• First, several biases make us think our writing is good just because we enjoy the sound of our own words. No matter how hard we try, we have trouble critiquing ourselves.
• Second, we are easily distracted, especially when editing. And we tend to focus on certain problem to the exclusion of others. For example, if you are reading through your document and spot some passive voice, you are now much more likely to obsess over the passive voice as you continue editing.
• Third, we are cursed with knowledge. We know what we are trying to say with our writing. So it’s much harder for us to notice road bumps that a fresh reader would spot more easily.

“We’re not like computers,” explains psychologist Tom Stafford, who studies typos at the University of Sheffield. Our brains are not wired to pick up every detail, at least not without enormous work.

Which dovetails nicely with another editing truth: Doing it right takes forever. Some say that it should take as long to edit as it does to draft. And no busy lawyer has time for that.

So we have two problems: (1) We can’t catch everything when editing our own stuff, and (2) even if we could, we don’t have the time.

These are problems for all lawyers. And so as a law professor, I spend a lot of time trying to help my students work through the same problems. One solution that I (and other law professors) have turned to is writing technology tools. I’ve written before about how programs like Grammarly can be a boon for writers looking to get better. The magic of these tools is that they don’t just help catch typos and poor grammar. Some of them are sophisticated enough to help train you to use new writing techniques.

Which brings us to Ross Guberman’s BriefCatch. BriefCatch is a revolutionary Word plugin that offers detailed editing feedback on your legal writing. BriefCatch is something entirely different from programs like Grammarly. BriefCatch is made not just for any writing but for legal writing. It has the power to help you spot more than grammar; it provides live editing suggestions on your legal prose, ranging from citation advice to sophisticated wordsmithing recommendations and persuasive writing tips that can transform your brief or motion. 

For legal writing teachers, BriefCatch is a gamechanger. We all lament how much law students and young lawyers struggle with basic writing style. Professors do what they can, but we simply don’t have time to teach students to be good writers.

But now, for the first time, we have a tool that can help students train legal writing techniques using their own writing. When we professors edit student’s writing, the value is not from the professor offering a suggestion—it’s that the professor is helping students learn to spot weak points in their writing and strategies for fixing them on their own. And that is precisely what BriefCatch can do—automatically, reliably, and around the clock. BriefCatch gives students the same sort of formative feedback and models for their writing style that we professors have struggled to offer ourselves.

That all sounds good, but I wanted to put it to the test. So several law professors and I created a working group to incorporate BriefCatch into first-year legal writing curriculum. Our goal was to use the tool to help students train many of the basic writing-style techniques that we don’t have time to drill in class.

Each week, along with their substantive writing work, students were asked to run BriefCatch on their assignment and to pay attention to a single type of editing recommendation. They recorded on a chart how many times the tool recommended that type of edit and how often the student agreed with it. The next week, students did the same thing but with a new type of edit.

Feedback from both the professors and students has been overwhelmingly positive. Students love that they can use the tool at their own pace. They love when they find new suggestions for word choice. And best of all, because they are the ones using the tool and calling the shots, they are learning to use these techniques themselves.

Of course, BriefCatch can’t replace a good writing teacher. Tools like this are a powerful supplement to help train and spot style techniques; they are not meant to teach aspiring lawyers how to put together the meat of a brief.

But that’s the beauty of a tool like BriefCatch: it lets professors devote time and energy to what we do best while shoring up our students’ skills in ways they don’t even realize.

Joe Regalia is a law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, William S. Boyd School of Law and regularly leads workshops training legal writing and technology. The views he expresses here are solely his own and not intended to be legal advice. Check out his other articles and writing tips here.