(Deliberate) practice makes perfect
'For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
Men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre.‘
Aristotle
Reading posts about how to write legal essays is perfectly fine. In fact, if the feedback you get from your tutors is not detailed enough, the best way to improve is to search for advice from any possible source. This blog aims to help you in your search, by providing actionable advice based on years of experience.
However, reading about essay writing is not enough. At some point, you need to actually start honing your craft and practice essay writing rigorously and regularly.
It is trite to say that practice makes perfect. It is also, in a sense, wrong. Not every kind of practice makes perfect; only deliberate practice.
Since the famous article written by Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer on “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance” in 1993, the concept of deliberate practice has received a lot of attention. It has also been popularised in the Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book “Outliers”.
As summarised in a recent article by Ericsson, laboratory studies of learning showed that performance was increased when participants “attend to the task and exert effort to improve their performance…. The subjects should receive immediate informative feedback and knowledge of results of their performance. The subjects should repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks”.
This quasi-definition of “deliberate practice” gives us a lot of food for thought. Essay-writing alone will not help a student improve her performance and her marks. The student also needs to make sure she focuses on three things.
First, pay attention to the task at hand and make an actual, conscious effort to improve. In other words, she needs to think long and hard about what it takes to produce an excellent essay, and not just try to reach the word limit and hit “submit”. This is key.
Second, she needs to ask for (and hopefully receive) swift informative feedback from her tutors or course leaders, whether this pertains to a formative or a summative assessment. This way the student will be able to spot and understand her weaknesses and work on them.
Finally, she needs to repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks, i.e. keep practising essay writing! This means that the practice should continue regardless of whether any deadlines are upcoming. Essay writing should become a standalone habit. You cannot ask yourself to suddenly be ready when the submission date comes around if you have not practiced before.
To sum up, deliberate practice is key. Action is necessary. “He who does something at the head of one regiment,” Abraham Lincoln reminds us, “will eclipse him who does nothing at the head of a hundred”. Make essay-writing a habit, stick to it and the results might amaze you.
