Letter of Inquiry

Sophia Blake, Ben Carver, Caroline Hecker, David Lorenzo

University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742

19 February 2018

The Honorable Fred Hecker

55 N. Court Street
Westminster, MD 21157-5155

RE: Research for Engl297- Introduction to Professional Writing

Dear Judge Hecker:

We are writing to you as students of the University of Maryland currently working on an

ethnographic research report on writing in a field of our choice. As a group, we have decided to
research and analyze legal writing from the perspectives of various careers within legal writing: a
defense attorney, a judge, a prosecutor, and a politician. As you have a background in two of
these fields, we are extremely interested to see how the two fields differ and how they conflate in
the legal writing profession. Your expertise in the field of law would be invaluable to our project
and we would greatly appreciate your input in our research. With this research, we hope to gain
insight on the various perspectives that are involved in legal writing and we would love to share
all of our findings and our final portfolio with you.

Overall for this research project, we are analyzing how different careers use rhetoric in legal
writing. We understand that given the field that we are studying, there are confidentialities that
cannot be discussed. We will make sure that everything that we use in our research is approved
by you and will not ask specifics on cases, but will try to understand the rhetorical realm of legal
writing through general texts and past cases. This research project consists of a research proposal
(3/7), an ethnographic report (4/11), and an annotated research e-portfolio (4/25). Besides these
dates, we are completely willing to meet with you at whatever times you are available. We
understand the value of your time and appreciate any moment you may have in your schedule.
All four of us have a different area in particular that we are interested in. So for this project, we
will be researching how you worked with writing as a defense attorney and how you work with
writing now as a Circuit Court judge. Through interviews and data collection, we will compile
our rhetorical analysis of professional writing in these two different fields and compare and
contrast the different jobs that work within legal writing.

The next step in our research will likely be a short informal interview in preparation for the
research proposal. This can either be done over the phone or in the form of a short list of typed
questions depending on your schedule. Please do not hesitate to get in contact with any of our
team members via email if you have any further questions prior to moving forward.
Thank you deeply for your consideration and if you are willing to participate in our study, please
send us an email and we can begin work on the proposal.
Sincerely,

English 297 Legal Writing Team