Resources & Support

Legal Writing Tip Sheets

Writing Fellows past and present have created a variety of legal writing tip sheets designed to help students through various aspects of a legal writing assignment.

Tip sheets were created by students and may not represent the views of any particular FL professor or the FL program.

Workshop Series

The Writing Fellows have hosted workshops on a wide range of topics, from mastering TREAT to preparing for exams. See below for links to previous workshops.


Past Workshops

Videos, PowerPoints, and other resources from Fall 2012 workshops are currently available in the "Announcements & Discussion" section of the 2012-13 LRW Program 1L TWEN page.  In the future, these materials will also be available on the Writing Center page on the GW Law Portal, which is where workshop videos from 2010 and 2011 are located. Once logged in to the Portal, click on the "Writing Center" page under the "Department Info" tab.

Legal Writing Competitions

There are more than 150 legal writing competitions hosted around the country each year. A wide range of companies, organizations, and law schools sponsor these competitions, which usually focus on a particular topic or practice area. Prizes range from cash to travel to publication of the winning papers.

Learn more about Legal Writing Competitions (updated 2/16/24).

ESL Help

The George Washington University Language Center provides a wide range of academic support for both faculty and students. The Language Center houses the English for Academic Purposes Program (EAP) for enrolled GW students with non-English-speaking backgrounds. The EAP program helps non-native English speakers develop their research and writing skills.

Additional ESL Resources:

Online Writing Resources

Guidance for Upper-Level Writers

These materials are intended to facilitate self-reflection and peer review among students writing upper-level/scholarly papers, as well as provide seminar professors a grading rubric. The guidance materials are presented as a series of questionnaires students can use to introduce discipline into the independent writing process. The questions should be deployed at key writing milestones: the thesis statement, the outline, the first draft, the second draft, and the penultimate draft.

The goal of this guidance is to raise student awareness of the high expectations of their audience, provide a structured writing process, and ultimately encourage a sense of confidence and self-sufficiency in the writer. As such, these review questions and rubrics can be used in practice, well after the student has completed the upper-level writing requirement.  The materials can also benefit seminar professors who may choose to assign periodic self-checks outside of class and use the rubric to articulate their expectations and later grade the paper.

Guidance for Upper-Level Writers (PDF)

Additional Writing Resources at GW

The GW Writing Center offers one-on-one writing conferences in Gelman 103. The undergraduate and graduate tutors who staff the center are not familiar with legal writing specifically, but they are trained to work with writing of any discipline, and help writers improve clarity, organization, and style.