Week 12

Complete your research report and first draft of your bill in preparation for the Editing Sessions.

You have now completed Stream A of this course and have sent a complete first draft of your research report and bill to the course participants and editors. During the next six weeks, you will take part in the Editing Sessions. We believe that editing – making detailed suggestions for improving bills and reports – comprises the best way to learn to draft. Each week, you will be responsible for evaluating a specific part of another participant’s bill or research report. Other members of the Distance Drafting Course review your submissions, and will suggest improvements in your bill and research report. When taken seriously, these Editing Sessions constitute, perhaps, the most important learning process in this distance course. This not only holds true for the participants’ whose drafts you evaluate and help to improve, but it proves especially useful for deepening your understanding of drafting theory, methodology and techniques – all of which you will have to review in order to make useful suggestions about the draft bills and reports of other course participants.

REMEMBER: The process of legislative drafting requires writing and rewriting. As you draft and re-draft both your report and your bill, you will inevitably find yourself re-considering and re-thinking the logic and the facts that show how your country’s unique circumstances influence the problematic behaviors -- the institutions – your bill’s detailed provisions aim to change. In that process, you will continually deepen your insights into the way your research report’s and bill’s substance and form, both, can help to ensure to your bill’s effective implementation.

The Editing Sessions work like this: Each of you, as assigned, will ‘edit’ (e.g. make detailed suggestions for improving) specific parts of another participant’s bill or research report. That means you should carefully read the part of the bill or report that you have been assigned to edit and that, before the end of that week, you should e-mail your detailed suggestions for improving that part’s substance and form to the course participants. [Those of you taking the course with a group of colleagues should read and discuss your editing assignment together, and then e-mail your group’s editing suggestions to the course participants.]

Do not be afraid of making ‘mistakes’ when you edit. No matter whether or not your editing suggestions prove helpful, both you and the participant whose work you edit will learn from the process. If your editing suggestions prove useful, the participant who receives them will learn from them. A participant who may not find your suggestions helpful will nevertheless have to rethink legislative theory, methodology and techniques in order to assess their utility.

Editing groups aim at helping not only the drafter of the bill and research report under discussion, but the other course participants as well. This course builds on the proposition that we learn through doing. The essential drafter’s skill consists of editing draft bills and research reports – especially, your own drafts and research reports. In the editing groups, you get opportunity to do editing. In the process, you will gain a greater understanding of how to edit more effectively – not merely someone else’s drafts, but your own.

During each of the remaining six weeks, we will focus, in turn, on editing one bill and research report. You will be assigned to edit at a specific section of the group’s bill or research report in light of this course’s theory and methodology, and should e-mail your comments and suggestions to the course participants.

Throughout the Editing Group period, you should continue listening to the Stream B audio-presentation tapes and doing the assigned drafting exercises as a basis for improving your own drafting techniques and your bill’s form.

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