usage

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 ⇒

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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Lawyers who make basic usage and grammar mistakes produce readers who are less receptive to their arguments.

One common usage mistake—and a particular obstinacy of the it’s-right-because-that’s-the-way-I’ve-always-done-it crowd—is failing to hyphenate phrasal adjectives.

Novice readers are usually ignorant of this mistake. But experienced readers get distracted—even downright irritated—when they encounter it.

So what are phrasal adjectives? And why is it important to hyphenate them correctly?

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In response to last week’s column, a reader lamented:

It seems that the current generation is striving to become far simpler than any previous generation could possibly aspire to be.

Really?

Does the “current generation” of legal-writing Snoots advocate a simple, direct writing style simply to rebel against previous generations of legal writers and their affinity for ten-dollar words?

Absolutely not. And for proof that a simple, direct writing style isn’t a newfangled idea, we need only consult some well-known 19th- and early-20th-Century writers and Supreme Court justices. Keep Reading ⇒

Lawyers are masters of words! Or something.

Despite evidence to the contrary, such as the trainloads of awful legal writing we all plow through every day, lawyers are in fact professional writers. As one of them, you may find yourself cringing when you hear the new words and phrases that some dictionaries add each year.

Ever wonder why you feel either delighted or horrified when you hear that “man cave” will now have a place in that hallowed tome traditionally given to young students? Just by feeling one way or the other, you are an unknowing participant in a long and bloody war over our language.

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