Sailing Through Designing Memo Assignments

Sailing and designing memo assignments have a lot in common. At first, both can seem overwhelming—so much to learn, so much to organize sequentially, and so much to get right in a short period of time. Mistakes mean instability, lost time, and possibly capsizing. Avoiding the mistakes, a good skipper can break through to clean water and good air, and teaching writing can be exhilarating. Exhilaration is contagious. The students and teacher both benefit from and enjoy working with an ideal memo assignment. Although the ideal memo may take many forms, several assumptions underlie the authors' concept of the ideal. First, sailors start by venturing out in a small boat, on flat water, in a light breeze. Similarly, legal writing assignments need to start with a topic that requires very simple structural analysis, usually a statutory elements analysis that teaches basic skills. From there, the wind increases and the next memo assignment is more difficult. It reinforces the skills students learned by completing the first memo, and it adds new skills in research, analysis, and writing. This process of designing writing assignments that both reinforce old skills and add new skills results in a spiral curriculum. The