Matthew Salzwedel
Matthew R. Salzwedel is a graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School, where he was lead managing editor of the Minnesota Law Review. After law school, he clerked for the Minnesota Court of Appeals, and then practiced complex commercial, banking, antitrust, health-care, and RICO litigation in Minneapolis and Philadelphia. He's now corporate counsel at a Minneapolis-based company.
He's published articles and book chapters on antitrust, banking, and UCC issues, as well as law-review articles proposing how to solve the academic corruption in college athletics. You can access his articles here . Follow on Twitter @mrsalzwedel.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas isn’t a fan of big words in judicial opinions. The Atlantic recently quoted him as saying that he tries to write opinions so that non-lawyers can understand them:
[W]e write [opinions] so that they are accessible to regular people. That doesn’t mean that there’s no law in them. But there are simple ways to put important things in language that’s accessible. [T]he beauty, the genius is not to write a 5 cent idea in a ten dollar sentence. It’s to put a ten dollar idea in a 5 cent sentence.
Justice Thomas gives sensible advice in the abstract. But how, in practice, can lawyers use simple words to convey complex ideas? And is simplified legal writing more effective in persuading judges and satisfying clients?
To answer these questions, let’s first put the justice’s advice in historical context. Keep Reading ⇒
Writing to British civil servants in the 1940s, Sir Ernest Gowers explained in The Complete Plain Words that effective writing is efficient writing:
To be clear is to be efficient; to be obscure is to be inefficient. Your style . . . is to be judged not by literary conventions or grammatical niceties but by whether it carries out efficiently the job you are paid to do.
Lawyers could learn a lot from Sir Ernest. Judging by their sprawling briefs and ponderous, verbose contracts, many lawyers care little about word economy. How can lawyers write more efficiently? They can start by targeting two main enemies of efficient legal writing: buried verbs (aka nominalizations) and unnecessary prepositions. Keep Reading ⇒
When I write this column, I try to focus on basic legal-writing principles. But there’s one controversial legal-writing subject that I can no longer avoid: how most legal writing could benefit from contractions.
It’s true that contractions aren’t generally accepted in legal writing. But it’s also true that they don’t deserve the label of uneducated vulgarisms, either.
So permit me a brief diversion to explore the controversy over contractions in legal writing. And at the end of the column, you can tell me what you think about the subject.
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A recent article on FindLaw.com called Five Ways Attorneys Waste Money claimed that attorneys can cut clients’ costs by avoiding needless motions, staffing cases leanly, focusing on the important issues, avoiding petty spats with the opposition, and being smart about when to settle.
But the article ignored the most important way attorneys can save money for their firms and clients: by learning how to write in plain English.
Most attorneys don’t believe that writing style matters. They might concede that writing in plain English can be aesthetically pleasing to the reader; but they also say that it’s not worth the time to learn how to do it because there’s no evidence that writing in plain English saves time or money.
But these attorneys ignore what legal-writing experts have taught — and what the empirical evidence has shown — for more than 50 years: that plain English saves time and money by increasing the ability of readers to understand and retain what they have read. Keep Reading ⇒
Good legal writers follow accepted rules of usage and style. But they also know that punctuation and grammar blunders can destroy any goodwill they’ve created with their readers.
One mark of novice legal writing is the haphazard use of three related punctuation marks: the hyphen, the en dash, and the em dash.
It’s easy, though, to learn the basic rules that govern these marks. And if you learn to use them correctly, they will add clarity — even beauty — to your legal writing. Keep Reading ⇒
One way lawyers attract snarks — readers who aren’t shy about pointing out grammar and usage blunders — is by not learning how to properly use sentence adverbs.
It’s of course possible to memorize the rules that govern sentence adverbs, including how to avoid the nonstandard sentence adverbs that cause the most trouble.
But although good legal writers have learned how to properly use sentence adverbs, you’ll rarely find them in their legal writing. Why is that?
Good legal writers avoid sentence adverbs because they’ve learned that they often reveal a writer’s sentiments or biases, which distract readers and paradoxically weaken the ideas the writer is trying to convey.
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Last week, I thumbed my nose at the approaching Mayan apocalypse and gave the first 6 of my 12 legal-writing resolutions for 2013.
It perhaps was no surprise that one of those resolutions—eliminating shall from contracts—produced a fracas among the commentariat. After all, outworn canards will always have their diehards.
That digression aside, here are my other six legal-writing resolutions for the New Year.
In 2013, I do solemnly resolve to improve my legal writing by:
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I wonder if lawyers who are drafting last-minute briefs or closing year-end business deals are approaching the frenetic holiday season with the same vigor given that the December 21 Mayan apocalypse might—as lawyers are wont to say—“render moot” all of their hard work.
If you read my columns, though, you know that I’m generally skeptical of newfangled ideas. So instead of wringing my hands until December 21 arrives, I’m going to end 2012 optimistically by making 12 New Year’s resolutions that I know will improve my legal writing in 2013. And I’m asking you to join me.
But because lawyers are loath to do anything without the requisite formality and solemnity, we must begin with an oath:
In 2013, I do solemnly resolve to improve my legal writing by:
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A few years ago, Bryan Garner began a legal-writing seminar by playing King Cotton, a march by John Philip Sousa.
For Garner, King Cotton is the epitome of the ideal legal brief—it begins dramatically; it explores its themes; and it closes forcefully.
Garner is right to call legal writing a performance. And lawyers can learn much from the great composers.
In particular, lawyers can learn to compose striking introductions to legal briefs by emulating the style and structure of the four symphonic movements. Keep Reading ⇒
Rigorous lawyers should be sticklers for detail. After all, they’re supposed to be professional writers. Yet lawyers often relegate the important task of catching misspelled words to their electronic spell-checker.
Worse, some lawyers use words they’re unsure about given the context of the sentence, and let their grammar-checker render the final usage verdict.
Not only can these abdications of professional responsibility result in malpractice claims and needless litigation, they also lead to comical usage bungles, some of which end up as examples in legal-writing texts.
Garner on Language and Writing contains numerous examples of usage mistakes common to legal writing, many of which a spell- or grammar-checker will fail to correct. I’ll examine nine of them below, along with a personal favorite.[1]
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