Writing across disciplines: UI is in elite company

Developing lawyers' superpower

"Words are a lawyer's superpower," Dawn Barker Anderson says. "Good writing requires good thinking. So, if you can express your words and your ideas clearly, it means you're thinking clearly. Legal employers are always looking for students who can communicate well, be that in writing or orally."

Anderson is a professor of legal analysis, writing, and research at the University of Iowa College of Law. The College of Law has seven dedicated legal-writing faculty with more than a century of combined teaching experience.

"Some of the highest-ranked law schools don't have any dedicated writing faculty," Anderson says. "We hear from judges about how strong our students are in writing and how favorably they compare to students from other highly ranked law schools. We work closely with students throughout their program of legal study to hone their writing skills."

In addition to the classroom writing experience, students are supported by the Writing and Academic Success Center. The center, directed by Anderson, was the first writing center of any kind to be housed exclusively within a law school. The center serves as an extension of the first-year Legal Analysis, Writing, and Research classroom, and peer tutors meet with first- through third-year students on course assignments, journal articles, and writing samples, providing feedback on organization, clarity, style, citation, and grammar.

Anderson says students practice their writing skills in the classroom, in their internships, by participating in national writing and advocacy competitions, and by writing for any one of four student-run law journals. In fact, Iowa Law has advanced to the National Final Rounds of the New York City Bar Association's National Moot Court Competition for four consecutive years. During this period, its teams have earned numerous brief-writing awards, including winning the nation's top-scoring Respondent's brief in 2024. Iowa Law is also the only school in the country with multiple first-place finishers in the Sports Lawyers Association annual law-student writing competition. Meanwhile, the college's Journal of Corporate Law is ranked second among corporate law journals, and a study by Washington & Lee University ranks the Iowa Law Review as the ninth most popular journal for overall citations and the third most popular journal for case citations over the past seven years.

"There are so many opportunities for students to hone their writing skills while pursuing their unique passions and interests," Anderson says. "Iowa has a good reputation for producing really good legal writers, and many students say that the writing program influenced their decision about where to go to law school."

Making writing a career

For those undergraduates who want to make writing a centerpiece of their professional lives, the university continues to expand on its long and historic creative writing tradition.

The English and creative writing major combines a rigorous grounding in literary study with a workshop-style focus on writing. Started just eight years ago, the major's popularity grew quickly. In spring 2024, the program housed 574 students and was one of the top majors of undergraduate degree applicants.

"Michelangelo looked out of his window and saw marble quarries, and so he sculpted the David. When our students put their ear to the soil, what they hear and what they see when they look out their windows, is a raw overwhelm of language," says Kaveh Akbar, associate professor and director of the English and creative writing major. "The material of our age and our station is language. And to be adept with that material, to use it with rigor and fluency, is a noble pursuit."

The major is designed to give students the tools to follow a variety of career paths, including creative writing, publishing, editing, public relations, marketing, advertising, social media communications, and teaching.

"Not every student that graduates from our program is going to go out and be New York Times bestsellers - although many have been," Akbar says. "We're imagining forward to futures that allow these students to take what they've learned and apply it to fields across the board, from business, to politics, to social work, and science. I can't imagine a more universally applicable skill set."

This skill set also includes AI. Akbar says he, his colleagues, and his students are imagining ways to use the technology creatively. But he says he is not worried about AI ruining literature.

"AI is very good at producing the exact average output, but history-making literature has never been about average," Akbar says. "Truly exceptional writing will still be as undeniable as ever.

"But I do think that there is space to learn skills like prompt engineering. How can you deliver a prompt to an AI system so that it gives you something interesting or provocative that you can then sort of riff around? These sorts of skills are totally applicable and useful-and, I think, exciting."

The demand for content also is increasing within the television and film industry. To help foster the next wave of such storytellers, the university debuted an undergraduate screenwriting degree program in 2019. In fall 2024, 195 students were enrolled in the program.

Iowa has long been a destination for its graduate writing programs, and its undergraduates are able to reap the benefits.

"I think that Iowa City has the greatest density of literary talent of any city in America," Akbar says. "The idea that you can come across Donika Kelly or John D'Agata or Sam Chang or Jamel Brinkley on the street is insane. It's the sort of thing that you would expect from a city 50 times our size - but in that case, you would never get to actually know them."

The writing and communication skills that all students gain at Iowa will benefit them long after they leave campus - both professionally and personally.

"Literature breeds empathy," Khalastchi says. "It helps give an understanding to the world around you, and these are things everyone can take into their field, no matter what profession they choose. Literature and writing are taken seriously here, whether you want to be a bestseller or successful grant writer. You put those together and it's the most unique writing environment in the world."