Facilitating skills transfer: a collaborative writing centre intervention for undergraduate Law students

Despite the ability to write being central to success in the legal profession, there is general consensus concerning the poor writing skills of law graduates. In an attempt to address these concerns, this paper reports on the joint effort of subject experts and writing centre practitioners to address law students’ legal writing skills early on in their law degree. The objective of the study was to evaluate the potential impact of a blended, subject-specific writing intervention designed to address first-year Law students’ academic essay writing skills in terms of structure, organisation and argumentation. A multistage evaluation design was adopted to measure the potential impact of the intervention by collecting qualitative and quantitative data at various stages to triangulate the findings of the study. The results showed a statistically significant improvement in the submissions of students who engaged fully in the various stages of the writing intervention. This study contributes to research that shows that by embedding writing development initiatives in disciplines which form part of disciplinary course assessment, higher education institutions might begin to make headway in meeting their obligation to ensure that students possess the key graduate attributes that are required to make a contribution to the workplace

Facilitating skills transfer: a collaborative writing centre intervention for undergraduate Law students

Despite the ability to write being central to success in the legal profession, there is general consensus concerning the poor writing skills of law graduates. In an attempt to address these concerns, this paper reports on the joint effort of subject experts and writing centre practitioners to address law students’ legal writing skills early on in their law degree. The objective of the study was to evaluate the potential impact of a blended, subject-specific writing intervention designed to address first-year Law students’ academic essay writing skills in terms of structure, organisation and argumentation. A multistage evaluation design was adopted to measure the potential impact of the intervention by collecting qualitative and quantitative data at various stages to triangulate the findings of the study.The results showed a statistically significant improvement in the submissions of students who engaged fully in the various stages of the writing intervention. This study contributes to research that shows that by embedding writing development initiatives in disciplines which form part of disciplinary course assessment, higher education institutions might begin to make headway in meeting their obligation to ensure that students possess the key graduate attributes that are required to make a contribution to the workplace

Interactions in print advertising

The unrelenting initiative of copywriters manifests itself in their growing tendency to use interaction within print advertisements and in their use of interactive print advertisements. Interactive advertisements demand more time and involvement of the target market that has to participate in some way in order to grasp the marketing message. In particular, people want to satisfy their curiosity – since part of the message is often missing – by   interacting with the advertisement (and thus the brand name). In the case of interactive print advertisements, the focus is on heightened involvement, which is the ultimate reward for the brand in an era of information overload. A clear distinction is made between interactive print advertisements and interaction within a print advertisement, where the objective is a more believable or authentic message. Such advertisements emphasise theuse of spoken language (as opposed to written language) which is reflected in the lexical choices, sentence structure, etc. Because people are usually sceptical of advertising messages, print advertisements try to mirror word-of-mouth  advertising and, in so doing, address the scepticism of their possible target market by exploiting the characteristics of normal conversation