Who’s Really Got the Right Moves? Analyzing Recommendations for Writing American Judicial Opinions

Abstract

There is little linguistic research on the structure of judicial opinions from a discourse analysis perspective. There are, however, many professional resources about writing judicial opinions. This paper contributes to genre theory and linguistics of languages for specific purposes by proposing a role for professional writing advice. We also construct a typology of macrostructures proposed by professionals and compare them to the move structure of authentic judicial opinions. Our results show that, in terms of large discourse units, professional resources and move analysis seem to converge. Professional resources, however, do not describe the variation that may be observed in authentic documents. In this way, corpora of professional advice may contribute to a deeper understanding of how a discourse community represents its own genres.