Ugly Legal Writing

• Author: C. Edward Good
• Position: C. Edward Good provides on-site training programs in effective legal writing for corporations, government agencies, professional associations, and law firms. Contact him at 240-GRAMMAR (240-472-6627) or cedwardgood@gmail.com. Visit his website at EdGood.com.
• Pages: 57-60

Published in Landslide® magazine, Volume 11, Number 2, a publication of the ABA Section of Intellectual Property Law (ABA-IPL), ©2018 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association.

Ugly Legal Writing

By C. Edward Good

Legal writing not only sounds bad. It looks bad.

Not a pretty sight, all those in-text citations, see, e.g.,

C. Edward Good, “Ugly Legal Writing,” 11 Landslide,

no . 2, Nov./Dec. 2018, at 55; parenthetically dened terms

(hereinafter “dened terms”); ALL-CAPS HEADINGS; and vari-

ous other typographical aws.

So here I’ll offer 11 ways to give legal writing a much-

needed facelift.

1. Use MS Word Styles

Most lawyers these days use MS Word. Unfortunately, many

don’t know how to use MS Word styles. When they create a

document, they type it in the “Normal” style, which automati-

cally appears when they start a “new” document. When they

need a blank line between paragraphs, they hit the “Enter”

key twice. When they need to indent the rst line of a para-

graph, they hit the “Tab” key. And when they need to format

an indented quotation, all sorts of bad things start to happen.

Legal writers would save a lot of time if they would learn

how to use MS Word styles. A style relates to a single para-

graph. It governs the font, the left and right margins, the

space between paragraphs, indentation of the rst line, tab

settings, and various other formatting features.

For around $18.40 you can buy Word 2016 for Dummies.

Save the receipt. Surely it’s deductible. Then, when you learn

C. Edward Good provides on-site training programs in effective

legal writing for corporations, government agencies, professional

associations, and law rms. Contact him at 240-GRAMMAR (240-472-

6627) or cedwardgood@gmail.com. Visit his website at EdGood.com.

Image: Getty Images