Tech Tips for Crisp, Clean, and Colorful Writing, 0617 COBJ, Vol. 46 No. 6 Pg. 57
Author | John Campbell, J. |
Modern Legal Writing
John Campbell, J.
Tech Tips for Crisp, Clean, and Colorful Writing
My last
article concluded that we should all be writing more active,
more engaging, and simpler briefs.
Tip 1: Write with Voice (Literally)
When I teach legal writing to law students, one of the advanced topics we work on toward the end of the year is developing voice in legal writing. Judges, experts on legal writing, and authors of all stripes agree that the written word should only contain sentences that you can easily speak.
Try to get your speaking voice in your writing. You would
never say, “this radio needed repair from the date of
purchase”; you would say, “this radio
hasn’t worked since I bought it.” When talking,
you tend to use short sentences, plain words, active voice,
and specific details.
Violating the “write more like you speak” rule begets legions of problems. Briefs that are devoid of pronouns, paragraphs that seem unrelated to one another, sentences that almost break under the weight of prepositions, and briefs that are as exciting to read as a statute are only a few. Because these problems are common, scores of writing experts make a living offering ways to fix symptoms of voiceless writing:
• Connect your paragraphs by using “relation back” words and repeating phrases.
• Make sentences punchier by eliminating passive verbs, finding “buried verbs,” and keeping the subject and verb close together.
• Use distinctive nouns and verbs instead of adjectives and adverbs.
• Keep your average sentence length to about 20 words.
This is all useful advice. But it treats the symptoms of voiceless writing without getting to the root cause. Why are so many of us colorful speakers but colorless writers? Perhaps if we could answer this question, we could find an elegant solution to voiceless writing and surrender our arsenal of technical editing rules.
I believe there are two primary reasons that many briefs are as dry as Colorado summers. The first is psychological, the second physical:
1. Many briefs are constructed one painstakingly edited sentence at a time, with the author wrestling with everything from citation to grammar to word choice. The author’s “inner editor” is constantly interrupting the rhythm of language.
2. Most of us do not type as fast as we speak or think.
Let’s take those in turn.
The first problem, which I sometimes call micro-fragmenting, occurs when the writer attempts to make each sentence perfect before moving onto the next one. The writer’s “inner editor” constantly interrupts, whispering that the citation is not in proper form, that it is “whom” not “who,” or that the prepositional phrase is misplaced. The result of this constant, real-time editing is that the brief is cobbled together. There is no flow or voice in the brief because there was no flow when it was produced. The brief is not a cohesive whole but a fragmented mess that’s hard to follow and boring to read.
The second...
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