Abstract
Many first-year students in the School of Law at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Howard College, who have been disadvantaged by a poor primary and secondary education, exhibit poor legal writing skills. Over a period of four years, in order to address this urgent need for legal writing instruction, the School of Law introduced two successive legal writing interventions. The first intervention was the Concise Writing Programme, followed by the Integrated Skills in Context Programme. The Concise Writing Programme focused on English writing skills and grammar in the hope that first-year law students would be able to transfer these generic writing skills to the more specific legal discourse within which they were learning to operate. The Law School reviewed the success of this initial programme and found that students who took part in the programme not only lacked the motivation to learn generic English writing skills, but that they also did not find it easy to transfer these skills to the more specific legal writing environment. The Law School then implemented a second legal writing intervention – The Integrated Skills in Context Programme. This programme acknowledged the fact that legal writing has a multi-faceted nature, encompassing legal analysis and application, as well as logical sequencing and argument, all of which could not be taught in a vacuum, particularly when most of the student base was largely unfamiliar with any form of legal discourse and many had English as a second language. This paper recognises that there is no silver bullet to improving the legal writing skills of these students. The reality is that it will take hard work as well as financial incentives to make a difference to these students' legal writing skills. Our students need intensive one-on-one attention by qualified academics, and this means that those doing the instruction must be recognised and adequately compensated.
 
Highlights
Each year, thousands of South African students enter tertiary education weighed down by the legacy of a largely dysfunctional school system.1 The disadvantage of a poor primary and secondary education runs deep and wide
The Integrated Skills in Context Programme was formally integrated into the second semester of the first-year law module Foundations of South African Law at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Howard College Campus, and made up 25% of the class mark
The Law School noted several significant positive features of the Integrated Skills in Context Programme, which were integral to achieving an improvement in the legal writing skills of its first-year students: a) The programme was fully integrated into the first-year law module, with a formal mark allocation
Summary
Thousands of South African students enter tertiary education weighed down by the legacy of a largely dysfunctional school system. The disadvantage of a poor primary and secondary education runs deep and wide. Impressive-sounding theories which are rich on jargon but poor on practical details of how to accomplish the hard work of dislodging firmly entrenched poor writing practices will not do In response to this issue, the School of Law at the University of KwaZuluNatal, Howard College Campus instituted a programme aimed at improving the poor legal writing skills that many disadvantaged first-year law students demonstrate. Achieving success in a programme such as this would take a continued concerted effort both on the part of the first-year students who would participate in the programme and on the part of the educators who would implement it This led to the introduction of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Law School's first legal writing intervention – the Concise Writing programme – in which the Law School teamed up with a language expert associated with the. The article will evaluate the relative success of the Integrated Skills in Context Programme, and recommend improvements to be made to it
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