This relationship between writing and reading has an obvious consequence:
reading and writing are complementary activities. Therefore, techniques for
reading are techniques for writing looked at from the opposite direction.
Let us illustrate this. In writing,
the task is to create a structure. In reading,
obviously
the task is to identify this structure. Putting this in another way, a
good structure leads to clear expression, which
in turn leads to clear
understanding.
Delvers and Porers
Reading any text, including a law text, has two aspects. A reader may want to
‘delve’ for specific information, or the reader wish to ‘pore’ over the text to
extract the overall message as distinct from a specific piece of information.
Since there are two tasks in reading, there are two classes of readers – delvers
and porers.
Delvers
To delve for information two things are necessary. (i) A reader must be
familiar with the parts and layout of the legal text. To illustrate, published
statutes and cases have a number of parts and a detailed layout. For example,
there is a part of a published statute which contains the tables setting out the
names and other particulars of statutes which have amended the statute. (ii) A
reader needs to be familiar with the particular devices which help a reader to
delve for and retrieve specific pieces of information. In a textbook these
consist of the index and the various table, most noticeably the tables of
contents, legislation and cases.
Porers
To read a text as a ‘porer’ a reader needs several things. The most basic
matter springs from the fact that from the perspective of communicating
information, reading and writing are complementary tasks. What is written is
read because this is the reason that it is written. Therefore, in this regard any
technique for writing law can generally be translated into techniques for reading
law –
a technique for reading is a technique for writing looked at from the
other direction. This is why so much emphasis is put on structuring a text.
Writing creates the structure while reading identifies it. Thus, the more clearly a
text is structured the easier it is to read.
This is of special relevance with regard to the overall structure of a legal text.
In writing law, the process which is most distinctively and essentially legal, and
thus distinguishes legal writing from other writing, is creation of the overall
structure. This overall structure is derived from the various models for
 |
 |
 |