Good, clear, forceful English.

• Jurisdiction: United States

Section 29. Good, clear, forceful English.—Good English is the next essential, though I shall do little more than state it. I don't pretend to be an expert on syntax or rhetoric, and so far as I am personally concerned, I write, for better or worse, entirely by ear. But the observations that follow may be suggestive, and possibly helpful.

A brief should be well written, but to be effective it must be clearly written. You are endeavoring to reach the minds of others, and therefore what you say must, above all, be clear. Clarity is more important in a brief than literary excellence.

Next, what you write should be grammatical. A lawyer is a professional man, in whom poor English should not be tolerated. I know that a good many brief-writers do not (perhaps because they can not) use good English, but there is really no excuse for any such performance. Offhand I should say that the only justified departure from the rules of grammar for a lawyer is the split infinitive, "to specifically perform." In that instance alone, the English Department is of no help to the equity practitioner.

A lawyer should also be at pains in his briefs, whatever may be the case in pleadings and contracts, to minimize legal formalisms such as "the said," "hereinbefore," "thereinafter," and the like.

Nor is it any longer a sign of learning to encumber a brief with excerpts from the Latin—unless they are very pat indeed. But, with the decline of the classics in the secondary schools and colleges, and a waning of the notion that the citizens won't think a man a lawyer unless he constantly spouts legal jargon in his everyday speech, there is much less of that nowadays than there was at the turn of the century or even before the First World War.

The Statement of Facts, as has already been indicated at length, should be straightforward, without embellishments and with a minimum of adjectives. It is not until the Argument portion of the brief is reached that you change the pace, so to speak, of your prose, and (if I may mix a metaphor by mechanizing it) really turn on the steam. From then on out, you argue!

Of course, it is well not to press too hard at your own weak points, for frequently the skill of the advocate consists in skating deftly where the ice is thin (or even where there isn't any ice at all). A good many situations will call for what has been aptly called "walking violently on eggs."

But you can't write an Argument without arguing. Consequently statements that might well be...