Book Reviews the Redbook: a Manual on Legal Style. Bryan Garner. West Group, 2002. $29.95
| Publication year | 2004 |
| Citation | Vol. 2004 No. 06 |
June 2004 - #11. Book Reviews The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style. Bryan Garner. West Group, 2002. $29.95
The argument may be fairly made that the field of style and rhetoric is full. Since the publication of Strunk & White's Elements of Style in 1959 and its universal acceptance as the guiding light of grammar books, there have been many imitators but few innovators. As writers, it seems we have either adopted this modest guide or supplanted it with an heir more adapted to our own taste. Either way, by the time we begin to write professionally, most of us have settled on a style, however hackneyed, and have learned or created nearly every grammatical rule that we are ever going to use.
Into this crowded and apathetic field Bryan Garner has introduced his The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style. Garner is probably best know as the current Editor-in-Chief of Black's Law Dictionary (7th ed.), but he has long been an educator and advocate of plain and simple legal writing. To this end, Garner has come out with a novel twist on an old idea: a guidebook on the rules of grammar and style that is at once comprehensive and quickly referenced. Think of this as Stunk & White meets the Bluebook. The latter is Garner's obvious model and not merely in choice of title. Indeed, The Redbook is organized along very familiar lines from its subsections and numbered rules down to its spiral binding and all-encompassing index. It is also immediately clear that Garner is aiming for the same universal acceptance that the famous legal citation manual enjoys.
Garner divides his subject into three logical areas: Mechanics, Grammar and Usage, and Legal Documents. From these, he spins out very specific rules on a series of subtopics. The first is far and away the most useful for the casual user. Mechanics covers all the necessary rules of design, punctuation, typeface, and capitalization that any conscientious writer frets over. If you are unaware of the difference among a hyphen, an en-dash, and an em-dash, as well as their proper use, then the first section alone is worth the price of admission. Garner's style in presenting these rules is authoritative, flexible, and well illustrated. Section 5, for example, discusses the various problems that arise over how numbers...
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