The article describes the experience of teaching the course "Fundamentals of Legal Writing" to students of the training program "Jurisprudence". The teaching is based on the analysis of grammatical errors made by compilers of texts of jurisdictional genres. The undertaken functional approach to learning made it possible to establish that, depending on the type of speech generated (narration, reasoning, description), writers experience various difficulties. Thus, the learning tasks of the course are divided into three groups. The first is aimed at mastering the rules for constructing grammatical models inherent to official business speech (nominal, semi-predicative and passive constructions). The second is aimed at mastering effective ways of narrating about the circumstances of the offense. The skills being formed are focused on compiling interrogation protocols. The third group of exercises is aimed at mastering models of reasoning about the causal relationship of facts and the relationship between the event of an offense and legal norms. This skill is necessary when issuing decisions, sentences, judicial acts, etc. It is noted that the description as a type of speech is found in drawing up protocols of inspecting objects or documents and accounts for mainly speech errors associated with the selection of lexical means.