In the holiday season, listening to family and friends can be a perfect gift. It doesn’t cost money and it’s deeply meaningful for the recipient. For the giver, sitting down with a cup of coffee and a friend can be a respite from the hectic, distracted, too-many-things-to-do feeling that ushers in the season.
Flickr/Rhett Sutphin
But making the listening happen, which requires cutting through that hecticness and the digital clutter of life (even on Thanksgiving), is hard. For lawyers, one somewhat natural method to help ourselves give the gift of listening is by asking questions. For that, I recommend the TED website’s list of “10 Questions to Ask Your Family Around the Table.”
Questions like “What was the hardest moment of your life?” are pretty big questions. And that actually makes them really good for lawyers, almost 60 percent of whom are introverts. Writing about lawyer introverts in The Legal Balance, Beth Buelow defined an introvert as “a person who gains energy from solitude and drains energy during social interaction.” Introverts tend to enjoy deeper one-on-one conversations (as opposed to superficial group chit-chat) which is why TED’s 10 Questions are so helpful. In her article on lawyer-introverts, Buelow talked about networking but might as well have been describing holiday conversations with family:
[S]how up with your natural curiosity, sense of humor and ability to listen. We all want to be seen and heard, and you’re giving a tremendous gift to a prospect or colleague [LLL: or relative or friend] when you really listen and give her your undivided attention.
Happy holidays to Listen Like a Lawyer’s readers. May each of you give and receive the gift of listening this holiday season.
Knowing your audience is key to any effective blog project. So who actually is the audience for Listen Like a Lawyer? Who cares — I mean who actually does care — about listening enough to read this blog and share posts from time to time?
At the outset, Listen Like a Lawyer’s primary audience was practicing lawyers and legal professionals, kind of like a CLE in blog format. There is such thing as a listening CLE as well as many CLEs on communication with significant listening components. Compared with several hours of listening training that detract from billable or other core work, the benefit of the blog is regular reminders and varied content in small segments over time. As a proponent of listening, of course I would recommend both listening CLEs and attention to small snippets of information spread out over time such as via this blog.
But this blog does not seek only to preach to the converted, i.e. great listeners who are engaged with listening concepts. My background is legal writing, and sometimes I get the feeling that many of the wonderful books and blogs on legal writing are devoured solely by lawyers who already care deeply about legal writing and are fantastic at it. Bryan Garner has written about the Dunning-Kruger effect as applied to legal writing: bad legal writers cannot even realize they are bad. We could debate how much Dunning-Kruger really applies to legal writers, but it most certainly does apply to listening. (Expect more elaboration in a future dedicated post.) Efforts to break through the unwarranted illusion of listening competence take a variety of forms.
No lawyer has ever openly denied to me that listening is important, but there are often discernible traces of a passive, unengaged attitude. Most of all I think it comes from a fixed mindset — the belief you’re either a good listener or not, and probably can’t do much to change that fixed quality. This blog is really trying to break through that fixed mindset about listening and promote a growth mindset instead. Clearly we need more posts directly on the growth mindset. (Carol Dweck is the guru of this field and her book Mindset is a highly recommended read.) The growth mindset is the way out of guilt and threat as the motivation for learning.
In the spirit of growth, the blog has also sought to teach some subtle information that lawyers may not have encountered explicitly before such as the power of nonverbal communication and discourse markers in speech. Some of the posts have delved into topics that perhaps are more suitable for trial consultants, such as this early series on cognitive biases. I don’t think the blog has done enough to speak to legal professionals who work in teams with lawyers, and that is a gap I hope to remedy in the future.
So, more than a year later, how has everything turned out? Did these efforts to reach the various components of the blog’s intended audience actually work?
The blog has reached its core audiences. Law professors have been the most ready audience and the most positive in sharing and helping. Thank you to all friends and colleagues who have been so encouraging! I am also grateful to the Academic Support blog and many professors such as Susan Landrum and Gabrielle Goodwin who have shared posts with J.D. and L.L.M. students. Contributing to a conversation on educating future lawyers as good listeners helps the blog indirectly achieve its goal of encouraging better listening in the legal workplace among lawyers, clients, and judges.
One way I know the blog has been at least somewhat successful in reaching lawyers and legal professionals is that they have found this blog through interesting and relevant search terms. They have used social media to share various posts as well. On a personal note, many have been willing to talk with me and share their thoughts. I was grateful for the opportunity to guest-blog about listening at Legal Productivity. The audience of practicing lawyers and legal professionals is the blog’s most important target, and will be a more direct focus of blog content moving forward.
A very small, surprising audience has been clients affected by their lawyers. One search query that led someone to this blog was, “Do I have to listen to my lawyer?” These search queries may, ironically, lead the searcher to posts about lawyers’ ethical duties to listen (and not listen) to their clients.
A larger and more surprising audience has been undergrads or graduate students, most of them apparently working on listening-related term papers. The blog has been found by a lot of search terms for the HURIER model of listening and the Worthington-Fitch Hauser model of listening. Although it was not the blog’s intent to be a source for college term-papers, such readers are welcome and in fact should know that listening is crucial in the law-school classroom and interactions with judges and clients. In other words, effective listening yields a competitive advantage in law school and lawyering. That was a central theme of the blog at its outset and remains so today.
Thanks to all who have read Listen Like a Lawyer in its first year. Please keep the blog in your Twitter feeds, your Facebook status updates, and your RSS subscriptions. Also please feel free to send ideas for future posts. Writing this retrospective inspired a number of ideas and I look forward to sharing them.
Thanks to Tami K. Lefko for this fun and informative guest post.
I often use clips from television shows and movies in class, and there are a few related to active listening that I especially like. Here are three of my favorites, from three popular sitcoms:
1. Everybody Loves Raymond, “Father Knows Least”
This early episode of Everybody Loves Raymond largely focused on active listening. In the first part of the episode (“Part I” below), Debra forced Ray to attend a parenting class with her after their daughter Ally began misbehaving. Ray did not take the class seriously and did poorly when he was asked to role play with the instructor and demonstrate how he listens to their daughter.
(Part I – Ray demonstrates ineffective listening skills in parenting class)
But later in the episode (“Part 2”), he has a little more success using active listening techniques with his own parents. The most relevant part begins about 50 seconds into the “Part 2” clip and continues for about two minutes.
(Part II – Ray does better with his own parents)
One tangential aspect of this episode that I find interesting is that it also illustrates (and debunks) a common misperception about skills like writing and listening: that they can’t be taught. Those of us who teach legal writing and related skills have probably all heard, at one time or another, the objection that these skills cannot be taught: either you are a talented writer (or good listener) or not. In this episode, Ray initially objects to attending the parenting class. He agrees to attend, however, when he catches himself saying that his parents never took a class and they did a fine job — not exactly how he usually describes their parenting. Similarly, his parents tease him about taking a parenting class, but the techniques he learned in class are shown to work well to diffuse one of their arguments.
Credit: Season 2, Episode 2/Original Airdate: September 29, 1997
2. The Big Bang Theory, “The Extract Obliteration”
For a more recent example, I like this one from The Big Bang Theory. In the clip below, Sheldon and Leonard realize they are talking past each other rather than having a real conversation, so they try using a chess timer to give each other a chance to speak in turn.
The brief non-conversation that prompted Leonard to suggest using the chess timer is included in this longer clip, but it is of lesser quality than the clip above:
Although the use of the chess timer is played for laughs here, a chess timer or something similar could be used effectively in class for listening practice. Clients often complain that their lawyers do not truly listen to them, and law students can also find it difficult to listen, uninterrupted, to another’s story. Using a chess timer or similar device could make students aware if they tend to interrupt or pressure a speaker rather than listening patiently.
Credit: Season 6, Episode 6/Original Airdate: November 1, 2012
3. The Office, “The Whale”
In the episode linked below, Pam tries to teach Dwight how to appear interested in what other people have to say so that he can sell to female clients more effectively, without much success.
Credit: Season 9, Episode 7/Original Airdate: November 15, 2012
All three of these episodes can be viewed in their entirety on Amazon Instant Video and similar services. If you have any favorites of your own on the listening topic, please mention them in the comments! I’d love to expand my repertoire of listening videos that are both entertaining and informative.
One way to become a better listener is to work with a coach. Just Google “listening coach” and you may be surprised by how many resources there are.
One coach who reached out to me is Laurie Schloff, Senior Coaching Partner with the Speech Improvement Company. She has worked with professionals including attorneys for more than 25 years, and (not surprisingly) believes that communication competence is essential to attorneys’ professional success. In one-on-one work, she uses this coaching framework:
Assessing goals and developing a plan
Individual or group sessions devoted to communication techniques and practice
Application of skills in business situations, for example, running an important meeting or coaching a new associate
Assessment of progress and future goals
Laurie provides various types of feedback, including her own personal feedback and video feedback. She also encourages attorneys to seek feedback from peers and to reflect and learn how to become their own coach (the concept of self-coaching).
Laurie coaches on all of the communication skills, but has some specific methods for helping attorneys improve their listening. She promotes the idea of “persuasive listening.” According to Laurie, persuasive listening means “conscious use of listening skills as a tool to build positive rapport, engagement and influence with others in your ‘communication world.’”
She encourages attorneys to think about listening in terms of the acronym “E.A.R.”:
Engage
Attend
Respond
For engaging, attorneys can do something they may feel very competent at, which is asking questions:
Attorneys can become stronger listeners by asking different types of questions depending on the situation. Laurie identified three particular types of questions to consider: “open,” “structured,” and “short reply.” An example of an open question is, “What are your thoughts about the training lawyers receive in listening skills?” An example of a structured question is, “What are some ways legal training could include listening skills practice?” An example of a short-reply question is, “Do you think lawyers are good listeners in general?”
For attending, the key issue is attention:
Attorneys can demonstrate attention to clients and colleagues by controlling distractions and multitasking. Employing positive behaviors are easy ways to convey attention, including occasional head nods and encouragers such as “uh huh” or “mhm.” Laurie pointed out that verbal encouragers are especially necessary during phone conferences. In person, even when taking notes, attention should be on the client’s face as much as possible.
And for responding, again Laurie encourages attorneys to think of different types of responses:
The attorney may be responding to Information, for example by paraphrasing or summarizing before offering a fresh perspective: “So you’re looking to settle this by November.” The attorney may be responding to feeling. This means identifying the undercurrent of emotion if appropriate: “I sense a lot of stress around this last minute change in deadline.” The attorney may be responding to a goal. By this, Laurie means moving the client or colleague in a positive direction: “So you’d ideally like to look at possibilities for a national seminar in 2015.”
Laurie intertwines her coaching with hypothetical examples and anecdotes from her experience. On the value of listening, she shared a few words of wisdom from some of her contacts in the legal world:
Esther Dezube, a private practice attorney who specializes in personal injury: “I listen to what is said and how it is said, starting from when the client walks in the door. If you don’t listen, you won’t be an effective trial lawyer.”
Tony Garcia Rivas, senior patent attorney at Ironwood Pharmaceuticals: “Attorneys may assume they know the problem and tune out. When I’m talking, I’m not learning.”
This article, “How Cognitive Diversity Affects Your Work” from the ABA Law Practice Today is one of the best things I have read in quite some time about how lawyers and clients interact. The author, Anne Collier, explores a hypothetical legal team’s relationship with its client, where the CEO and general counsel have different cognitive styles and the lawyers on the legal team have different cognitive styles as well — not to mention the huge differences among the CEO and one of the lawyers on the team. These differences emerge from different approaches to the “paradox of structure” in solving problems: “The paradox of structure is the seemingly incongruous fact that structure both enables and limits one’s ability to solve a problem.” A group of professionals can all be operating at a very high level but still have different preferences for structure and innovation. Their differing preferences can lead to clashes in cognitive style.
The article focuses on some (fascinating) metrics for problem-solving styles and never uses the word “listening.” Yet listening is part of the “bridging” and “coping” strategies it recommends for handling clashes of cognitive styles. My favorite line in the article, other than the one about the paradox of structure, is this example of a nonverbal bridging strategy: “Oscar agrees to give Madison ‘the look’ in meetings when she needs to be more concrete.”
Have you investigated your own cognitive style, or gotten informal or formal feedback on it? How do you use listening skills — including nonverbal signals — to perceive and anticipate problems stemming from cognitive diversity?
A friend recently sent me a nice compliment about the blog. She works in sales and marketing (not within the legal industry) and said she’s finding the listening skills discussed here very useful for communicating with both “internal and external customers.”
Courtesy Flickr/Elliott Brown
The focus on “internal and external customers” (or clients) caught my particular attention. Of course lawyers are going to want to listen intently to their external clients. One way to keep a client is to listen; conversely, a great way to lose a client — especially a senior business executive — is not to listen, such as by checking your smart phone during a meeting.
But is effective listening different for lawyers’ internal and external clients, or should it be? Apart from what listening practices are most effective, as a descriptive matter might lawyers subconsciously listen differently in internal and external situations?
Barkai suggests that we can evaluate active listening on at least three metrics:
accuracy: did the lawyer understand the speaker’s informational content and emotions?
intensity: did the lawyer understand the intensity of the speaker’s emotions?
form: did the lawyer respond with clean, simple paraphrasing — or did the lawyer use what Barkai views as potentially patronizing and unhelpful introductory phrases such as “I understand” and “What I’m hearing you say is . . .”?
So with these metrics in mind, we can reflect on whether lawyers listen with different degrees of accuracy, attunement, and form when they are dealing with external versus internal clients. Here are two brief hypothetical case studies:
Lawyer #1 believes in the importance of listening and attempts to be a particularly strong listener with external clients. He focuses on their information and their content, and he accurately perceives the strength of their feelings. But he wants to show them how carefully he listens, and thus habitually and intentionally uses phrases such as “I understand” and “As I see it.” Sometimes these phrases lead clients to feel a bit patronized, and as a result they may hold back.
Lawyer #2 is at a stage of her career where she wants to show her technical lawyering skills to senior lawyers. She listens with a strong focus on the information they are sharing, and she concisely reiterates information and tasks to ensure everyone is on the same page. She is not quite as accurate at judging the emotional state of senior lawyers. Sometimes Lawyer #2 asks task-related follow-up questions too quickly. Slowing down the conversation by reiterating general instructions could allow her to glean more global, contextual information about how the senior lawyer feels about the representation and wants to approach it.
Ultimately, whatever the context, effective listening demonstrates strength at each step of the listening process — roughly attention, perception, memory, understanding, analysis, and response. (This outline is drawn very generally from listening frameworks such as Brownell’s HURIER model and Worthington and Fitch-Hauser’s MATERRS model.)
Also regardless of context, effective listeners are “uniform” in their ability to choose and tailor their approach for the particular situation. The best communicators will take the internal/external factor into account — of course. But that’s just one of many other factors such as the length of the relationship; the other person’s stress level; the complexity of the content; the time of day; and the other person’s preferred style of communication such as informal or formal, just to brainstorm a few.
In this sense listening is just like all the other communication tasks a lawyer performs: there is a very broad common framework for effectively performing each task, and the most effective listeners/speakers/writers tailor their approach within the framework to meet the needs of the client — whether internal or external.
*Thanks to Lou Spelios for comments on an earlier version of this post.
Debra Worthington, Jennifer Romig, and Margaret Fitch-Hauser
But their practical work in trial consulting was where our experiences and vocabularies overlapped a lot more, and where our most interesting conversations took place. Professor Worthington worked for 15 years in courtroom communications before she delved more deeply into listening theory and research. Professor Fitch-Hauser, now celebrating her retirement from Auburn, also works as a consultant and is the person who drew Worthington into the listening field. Their work together culminated in the listening textbook Listening: Processes, Functions and Competency.
The combination of their theoretical strength with their practical experience in the legal field made me doubly grateful for the opportunity to meet and talk with them over a long lunch in Auburn.
Worthington recounted her work with a difficult witness whose arrogance had damaged his case, both on the substance and his refusal to heed his lawyers’ guidance on demeanor. Worthington studied his testimony to understand his view of the case. She talked with him to find out what “really made him tick.” And then she used his underlying motivation to explain the case to him in a different way, and to motivate him to adopt good witness practices not because his lawyers told him too but for his own reasons as well.
As I thought about this anecdote, I became even more intrigued with the role trial consultants may play as listeners. For example, intuition may affect one’s listening. A lawyer’s intuition on dealing with a horrible witness may overlap — but not completely — with a trial consultant’s own intuition. And thus the lawyer and trial consultant would bring complementary methods to the table not just in generating themes and telling the story, but in listening to the people who in turn will be listened to by the jury.
Along these lines, Worthington shared that at an early juncture in her career, after she had already been working in legal communications, she considered whether to continue with graduate education or go to law school. Her mentor advised the former. “Debra,” he said, “your greatest strength is that you don’t think like a lawyer.”
Fitch-Hauser echoed the value of stepping outside the lawyer’s perspective: “It is crucial for attorneys not to expect the client to think as they think, and to make adjustments, and to not expect the jury to think as they think. They need to adjust their strategy and the way they tell their story to meet the jury’s needs.”
Both Worthington and Fitch-Hauser have been interested in questions about how listening intersects with personality, and how listening can be measured. One question I wanted to ask both of them relates to measurement and self-assessment: “How can an attorney know if he or she is a bad listener?”
Fitch-Hauser jumped to take this question:
There are some things anyone — attorney, or any other profession — can do, if they are willing to be objective. Ask yourself: When someone asks a question, do you always know the answer before the answer is given? If your own answer is yes, you may be listening to yourself rather than the other person. This is “selective listening,” which by one definition means “listening for the information that reinforces your own attitudes, ideas, and feelings.”
Worthington added the terms “assimiliation” and “constrasting” to the discussion at this point. Assimilation means taking in information that fits your pre-existing beliefs. Essentially, if you believe someone is similar to you, then you may perceive information from that person as closer to your existing beliefs than it really is. And the opposite is contrasting. If you go into a situation thinking someone has different beliefs, you may tend to perceive that person’s information as more different from your own beliefs than it really is. (Assimilation and contrasting seem generally related to the cognitive phenomenon of confirmation bias. Some general thoughts on listening and various cognitive biases including confirmation bias have been explored on Listen Like a Lawyer here and here and here.)
Fitch-Hauser embodies thoughtful listening in her own conversational style, and reinforced that with some advice: “Don’t be afraid to use silence.” Sometimes clients come to lawyers with a “story” that may or may not match the facts. By talking with them and learning how they feel about the case, and at times remaining silent, an attorney can find out more about the real story behind what the client presents as the “official story.”
Worthington and Fitch-Hauser also touched on the power of nonverbal communication as an aspect of listening. “Look at the client as the client is talking,” Fitch-Hauser advised. “You can hear the pause and see them glance away. And then you can say, ‘It seems like there’s something else you want to add.'”
Ultimately, being a bad listener is somewhat part of the human condition, Worthington said. We all have moments of effective and ineffective listening. Lawyers, and anyone else who cares about communication, can seek an honest self-assessment of when they listen well and not so well. By keeping a communications journal, lawyers can start to recognize the situations when their listening is strong and weak. Reinforcing a theme from their textbook, Worthington noted that the answer to good listening versus bad often lies in the motivation to listen. “Motivation is finding some reason inside ourselves to expend the energy and get in there and listen.”
Fitch-Hauser sharpened the edge a bit: “Pretending to listen isn’t listening. Many people go through the motions. They put on the face, they lean forward, they nod, and they turn on a light. But they truly need to be home.”
This week I am excited for the opportunity to meet with two big names in the listening field, Debra L. Worthington and Margaret Fitch-Hauser. They are communication professors at Auburn University and, among many other papers, are co-authors of a 2012 textbook, Listening: Processes, Functions, and Competency.
Professor Worthington has studied persuasion and juror decision-making and, more broadly, the effects of different listening styles. One of her papers addresses whether verbal aggression corresponds with any particular listening style. Not surprisingly. verbal aggression is inversely correlated with a people-focused listening style. But it’s not strongly correlated with the other classic listening styles:
action listening (tendency to focus on errors and inconsistencies in a message, and how it relates to a task)
content listening (tendency to focus on claims and support)
time listening (tendency to focus on how much time a communication event takes, and to prefer hurried interactions)
(These listening styles were first identified by listening scholars Kittie Watson, Larry Barker, and James Weaver and have been explored in a variety of papers. How lawyers may use these different listening styles is an interesting topic for future blog posts.)
Professor Fitch-Hauser studies listening fidelity and other measures of listening. Listening fidelity is a useful concept for any professional: when a listener listens to a speaker/source, how similar are their perceptions of the “communication event” they both experienced? Listening fidelity means their perceptions are more congruent. Her work also has touched on listening styles and personality, such as her paper with Stephanie Lee Sargent and James B. Weaver III on “A Listening Styles Profile of the Type A Personality.”
In their textbook, Worthington and Fitch-Hauser survey the listening literature and acknowledge the difficulties of studying listening. It is so difficult to study because it is inherently a “hypothetical construct, something you know exists but you can’t physically see.” Models of listening provide insight into what is really happening in this hypothetical construct. Thus listening models help with identifying where listening success and failure may occur.
The Worthington Fitch-Hauser model of listening is “MATERRS”:
Mental stimulus – intentionally attending to a noise or stimulus
Awareness – beginning the mental sorting process, which can be adversely impacted by a high cognitive load such as multitasking
Translation – processing the message rationally, emotionally, or both
Evaluation – using existing frameworks for understanding to connect the message to one’s existing knowledge
Recall – storing the message in working memory and possibly long-term memory as well
Response – deciding how to respond
Staying connected & motivated – building relationships, evaluating and perhaps changing one’s own frameworks for understanding future listening events, maintaining motivation to listen, and challenging one’s own personal biases
The last aspect of the WFH listening model — staying connected and motivated — was particularly interesting to me. It represents listening as not just a one-time event but an overall life competency. That’s just one of many reasons I am excited to meet and learn from Professors Worthington and Fitch-Hauser.
On the one hand, the writer is so familiar with his subject that he glosses over things the reader is utterly clueless about. On the other, it’s way too easy for the writer to get caught up in the minutiae of how things “really work” and lose sight of the story itself.
Cron then takes a bit of a cheap shot, although maybe it’s deserved:
This is something that, for some reason, lawyers seem particularly prone to.
(Digression: Forgive this one moment. Cron’s book is great, and particularly great for any law student or lawyer interested in storytelling.)
Composition scholars and legal writing scholars have been talking about this “curse of knowledge” in different words for a long time. In this post I’m drawing in particular on an article by Irene Lurkis Clark, Listening and Writing, 3 J. Basic Writing 81 (1981), available at http://wac.colostate.edu/jbw/v3n3/clark.pdf. Professor Lurkis Clark did some interesting work with listening and writing that helps explain why and how listening can help build better writing.
A different way to describe the writer’s curse of knowledge is the problem of “writer-based prose,” a term coined by famous communications scholar Linda Flowers. Writer-based prose is bad because it assumes the reader already knows what the writer is trying to say. This kind of prose is an “‘unretouched and under processed version’ of the writer’s own thought.” Students must learn to produce “reader-based prose,” which entails a “deliberate attempt” to reach the reader using “shared language and context.”
Effective listening can help with effective writing too.
This is in part because language skills are integrated. Some scholars claim they are completely integrated (good reader = good writer = good listener = good speaker). Others take a more nuanced position, seeking to explore and define the boundaries between listening, reading, speaking, and writing. The extent of integration need not be resolved for listening to help a lawyer or law student wanting to write more effectively.
For example, reading your work out loud is something we are all told to do. Professor Lurkis Clark explored the composition theory behind this recommendation — namely that “listenability” and “readability” are closely related. Early work in listenability actually used readability scores to measure listenability, a method that has been questioned and refined since then.
Based on the connections between listenability and readability, Professor Lurkis Clark proposed that students listen to each other’s writing and share structured feedback. The idea is that beginning (non-legal) writers can build their reading comprehension skills and gain a stronger sense of audience. If students’ listening is stronger than their reading (which can be the case with unskilled writers), then critiques based on listening may be more advanced than those based on reading.
Lurkis Clark didn’t claim peer review by listening was a novel idea, but she sought to explore why it works and what it’s best suited to do. In this work and a subsequent experimental study of how evaluators scored text depending on whether they listened to it or read it, Professor Lurkis Clark concluded — not surprisingly — that listening is best for critiquing structure, content and audience appropriateness. She found a high correlation between scores assigned to a text by listeners and those assigned by readers of that same text. Taken in sum, her work validates the role of listening in what is, ideally, a virtuous spiral of developing communication skills:
One’s ability to listen . . . can enhance one’s ability to read, which, in turn, can enhance one’s ability to revise, which, finally, has significant implications for the production of coherent discourse.
This post begins a series on listening and writing.
Being a better listener can help with being a better writer. There are broad, non-law-specific reasons this is true, supported in the general communications literature. And there are law-specific reasons as well.
From the general literature: Listening is the foundation for speaking, which is the foundation for reading, which is the foundation for writing, writes Sara Lundsteen in Listening: Its Impact at All Levels on Reading and the Other Language Arts (1979). The initially crucial role of listening in this developmental process leads Lundsteen to posit: “Since listening is a foundation for writing, improving listening is likely to affect composition.”
Listening plays a role in writing skills in both an outward-facing and inward-facing way:
Listening in childhood builds vocabulary and the ability to generate complex sentences.
“Internal listening” is part of the writing process. Lundsteen gives the example of children talking to themselves when writing: “Let’s see, I’m going to write about a dog that ate a mean man.”
Problems with either type of listening could compromise the ability to generate strong writing. And strengths in these areas seem likely to correlate with strong writing.
The application to legal writing is pretty obvious. If a (legal) writer has a strong vocabulary and ability to generate complex sentences, that person’s (legal) writing is likely to be more advanced. Likewise, if a (legal) writer is able to engage a meaningful internal dialogue about writing (“now I’m going to address the other element”), the writing is likely to be stronger. While reading helps with all of the above — of course — reading alone seems insufficient. Listening to words in context and using those words in conversation with others, listening to how words are arranged in spoken sentences, and listening to one’s own ideas about what is worth communicating and how to make that happen — all of these forms of listening can enrich one’s writing.
The claim that better listening leads to better writing is difficult to prove, Lundsteen acknowledges. Several causes could make writing improvement difficult to discern: “complexity, the slow pace of such growth, and the imprecision in measurement of language arts skills.”
Yet this claim has an intuitive appeal, as she points out: “Not all problems [with language] are solved by using effective listening and reading, but it is doubtful that many are solved without help from these subskills.”
Listen Like a Lawyer 