Bar Exam Essay Time Management: Four Roles Strategy

Bar Exam Essay Time Management: Four Roles Strategy

Many bar exam takers have trouble with bar exam essay time management. They read the call of the question, then immediately dive into writing, worried that they’ll run out of time. But then they find themselves stuck in the middle of the essay, not sure how to proceed. Or they write furiously, then review the essay with only minutes left on the clock and realize that they got the substantive law wrong, with no time to fix it. Or worst of all, they may review it and find out that the essay makes no sense, and that the grader will find it incomprehensible. There is a solution to these problems: the Four Roles strategy!

Bar Exam Essay Time Management: Four Roles Strategy

The Four Roles strategy is adapted from a system by Betty Sue Flowers, a former English professor at the University of Texas at Austin. The 4 Roles are different personas that the writer adopts at different stages of the writing process: Inventor, Architect, Carpenter, and Critic.

Inventor: Generate ideas

The Inventor’s role is to generate as many ideas as possible, with no concern about sentence structure, grammar, or style. The Inventor fixes the typical writer’s problem of trying to sort everything in their head before writing, which results in a jumbled and nebulous mess. Get those ideas out of your head and onto the page! This will also help you work through tricky areas of law and get to the right answer before starting your essay. It’s much easier to fix a mistake or reason through a difficult legal test at this stage than in the actual essay.

Architect: Put Your Idea Into Order

The Architect takes all the ideas generated by the Inventor and puts them into an outline. The Architect fixes the typical writer’s problem of making up the structure as they go along. Most people “write to think”, getting their thoughts in order as they proceed. When they review their writing, it makes sense to them, since it matches their thought process. But your essay graders were not around to follow your thought process, and will not be able to follow your writing. Instead, you must “think, then write”. By putting the major pieces of your essay into an outline, you can strategize how the essay will flow. This isn’t the time to fret over word choice or sentence structure! The Architect thinks at the paragraph level, and can’t get tripped up by small details.

Carpenter: Build One The Frame

The Carpenter uses the structure put together by the Architect and builds the supporting pieces. This is the time to think through word choice, sentence structure, transitions, and style. The Carpenter doesn’t need to think about the essay’s structure or nuances of legal argument, and can focus instead on building an essay that reads easily and flows well.

Critic: Fixing and Reshaping

Lastly, the Critic takes a sharp look at the essay and fixes any lingering problems, from correcting typos to relocating paragraphs. Putting the Critic at the end of the 4 Roles fixes the typical writer’s problem of trying to edit at the same time as writing. Most writers find the hardest part of writing is getting started: they write a sentence, then scratch it out in frustration over how awful it is, and start again. By keeping the editing at the end, you can put words on the page for you to then go back and fix.

Keep the Four Roles separate!

Imagine attending a play and watching one actor play multiple roles at once, but without any changes to their costume, vocal inflection, or body language. You would be terribly confused! In the same way, each of the 4 Roles are meant to work separately. Otherwise, they will interfere with each other and muddle up the whole process. You may find the Architect and the Carpenter roles blending into each other. That is normal, since their roles complement each other well. What’s most important is keeping the Inventor far away from the Critic, to give the Inventor time to work through ideas without the Critic’s heavy editing.

The Four Roles in action – California Bar Exam Essay (1 hour)

The California Bar Exam involves three one-hour essay questions. Here is a sample time breakdown for one of those essays:

10 minutes – Read the call of the question closely. Re-read it several times

10 minutes – Inventor

5 minutes – Architect

25 minutes – Carpenter

10 minutes – Critic

The 4 Roles in action – MEE Essay (30 minutes)

The MEE essays are shorter, and only provide 30 minutes for you to answer. Still, you can apply the 4 Roles in that context as well:

5 minutes – Read the call of the question

5 minutes – Inventor

5 minutes – Architect

10 minutes – Carpenter

5 minutes – Critic

Use the Four Roles with our other bar exam essay tools

The 4 Roles is just one of the many tools we offer for the bar exam essays! Take a look at our bar exam essay IRAC template, our 4 quick tips on how to write a great bar exam essay, and our comprehensive guides for both the Multistate Essay Exam and the California bar exam essays.

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