(LexisNexis)
I focus on the one issue that will decide the case. I have done this for many years. For me, it has been the key to persuasion, a very successful technique.
When I write, I focus on the one issue that will decide the piece. This is natural enough, I can see, what with all that successful experience of focusing on the one issue that will decide the matter.
However, it is not a universally shared approach to cases, writing, or other matters. This lesson came hard to me, but it came nonetheless. Focusing separates people, whether they are writing or not. But today, and here, I am writing about writing.
My observation in this blog article is a simple one. Actually I have already made it: Focus on the one issue that will decide the piece that I am writing.
For example, I originally wrote a poem about lawyers arguing cases and especially about judges deciding cases. It was and is a poem about what it is like to experience the ways in which one group makes their arguments and the other group decides. I wrote the poem as a villanelle and openly based it on Dylan Thomas's famous poem Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night. I even called my poem Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Fight.
Well, I must have lost sight a little bit of my overriding objective in writing the piece. I did not know it when I wrote it, but based on reaction to it, I must have lost sight of the one issue that prompted me to write it in the first place.
Some people reacted to it as though I wrote an indictment of all judges or maybe all lawyers, or both. Plus the tone was a little intense, perhaps, in the original version which is all right, of course, except that in this case it distracted from the reason I wrote the poem.
So, I tweaked it. I used a couple of different words and edited some punctuation to make my meaning clearer: I wrote the poem about judges who write overly long opinions about very little things.
Hopefully my edited version, now online, reflects that. And hopefully the edited version also reflects a little less intensity about the people in it, while preserving a real sense of enthusiasm for the subject of it. It tells a story that in my view still needs to be told even if, in this case, it needed to be tweaked.
This post was previously published today on Claims and Issues Blog. Reprinted here with permission.
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