Legal office helping Team MacDill turn better phrases

  • Published
  • By Nick Stubbs
  • 6th Air Mobility Wing Public Affairs
MACDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. --  What is good writing?

Writer Bill Wheeler said, "Good writing is clear thinking made visible."

What's the secret to good writing?

William Zinsser said, "Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity."

Communicating clearly with the written word is essential to an Airman's career, believes Maj. Cynthia Kearley, 6th Air Mobility Wing deputy judge advocate. To help the base population with writing skills, the legal office sponsors a free writing clinic the first and third Friday each month. It is open to all, and held from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the legal office courtroom in building 299. No reservation is required.

Major Kearley, who is from the Zinsser school of brevity, simplicity and clarity when it comes to writing, heads the workshop and tries to pass that message on to clinic participants. Each session starts with a 20-minute seminar on a writing related topic, with the most recent class focused on fragments, run-ons, and comma splices. The next class is Friday.

Major Kearley believes writing skills are essential to one's work and personal life, and that most anyone can benefit from the workshops, which have been running for about a year and are modeled after university writing clinics which offer editing and review of papers.

"We (the legal office) wanted a way to provide a service MacDill which utilized our skill set," said Major Kearley, who added that effective writing is a central component of the work in the Judge Advocate's office. "It's the bread and butter of the legal office -- the ability to communicate with the written word."

One of the biggest benefits of the workshops is that attendees can bring their work in for review. The "second set of eyes" is essential to producing good work, said Major Kearley, adding that the importance of editing -- including multiple edits -- cannot be emphasized enough.

"It can take as many as 10 edits to produce a good paper," she said. "You have to have that level of review to ensure good work."

While most of the advice offered in the clinics is focused on effective writing for school, applications and presentations, the short workshop sessions at the start of each clinic sometimes address writing style and elements that fall into the realm of creative writing, a useful skill when trying to convey emotion, something that could be useful for military members who might have to recount events related to a deployment.

In an age when written communication is being reduced to texting, abbreviations and emoticons, Major Kearley said she encourages people to write whenever possible, including personal writing, to hone their skills and preserve what some might consider a dying art.

"Writing is something you can only improve with practice," she said, adding that a good editor to review the work is the other half of the equation.

"Even if people only want to use us for reviewing their work, it can be a valuable tool,"
Major Kearley said. "It's something we are glad to help anyone with, whether they are military, civilian or student."