Posts tagged as:

writing

Should I market differently in a down economy?

June 26, 2009

In this tough economy, perhaps the most frequently asked question I get from my business development coaching clients, as well as attendees at my marketing CLE’s is “Should I be doing anything differently now?”
The answer is basically no. Now is the time you simply cannot afford not to market. You need to reconnect with former [...]

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10 steps to writing a great law school final paper

April 30, 2009

This week I have offered study and test-taking tips for the common law school exam formats. Today I cover the last common evaluation method, the final paper. In prior posts, I wrote as a recent graduate. This post I also write as an adjunct professor of law who will grade final papers in the coming [...]

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Cops talk funny (and so do many lawyers)

January 31, 2009

Lawyers could learn a thing or two from Val Van Brocklin, who argues that “cop talk” hurts officers’ credibility on the stand, probably because nobody can understand what the heck they are talking about. She suggests cops should make up flash cards to help them learn English again.
Make up some flash cards. On one side, [...]

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Please stop capitalizing every other word

September 25, 2008

Lawyers have a terrible habit of Overusing Capitalization. This goes for pleadings, discovery requests, briefs, you name it. Exuberant capitalization is the “cop talk” of legal writing.
For those prone to over-capitalization, the Evanston Township, Illinois, high school has a great primer on capitalization. Litigators capitalize some other words, like Plaintiff and Defendant, by convention, but [...]

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Bryan Garner interviews the U.S. Supreme Court justices

March 4, 2008

For the word nerds, here are interviews of eight of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices (Roberts, Stevens, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Alito), taken between 2006 and 2007 by Bryan Garner, the legal writing geek. I have not had a chance to sit through all of them, yet, but I plan to set [...]

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Don’t use Helvetica for absolutely everything

January 28, 2008

This. For the love of God. So says Robin Wicker, a graduate of University College Falmouth, in a flickr pool for graduates to pass on their wisdom to incoming students. And so says me.
Attorneys should know by now that Helvetica (or Microsoft’s bastard spinoff, Arial) is a terrible, terrible font choice for use in legal [...]

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Style tips for HTML

May 29, 2007

A List Apart has a great article on using special characters in HTML. According to the article, decimal codes are the way to go, and you shouldn’t trust FrontPage and Dreamweaver to insert the correct character codes for viewing across browsers.
The article also goes into an illustration–well worth reading–on the differences between hyphens, em dashes, [...]

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