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• Publication year: 2019
• Pages: 0076
• Citation: Vol. 24 No. 6 Pg. 0076

Writing Matters/b>Vol. 24, No. 6 Pg. 76Georgia Bar JournalJune, 2019

Organization Matters

BY DAVID HRICIK AND KAREN J. SNEDDON

Our job when writing is to convey, accurately and efficiently, the information and advice that the reader needs to receive. We hope these strategies will help you in that quest.

Deciding what content to include in any legal document is critical. But how to organize that content may be just as critical. This installment of “Writing Matters” focuses on organization. After a refresher about why organization matters, we will share five strategies to help organize your legal writings.

Why Organization Matters

We write legal documents for an audience of specific readers. No matter who the audience is—a client, opposing counsel, beneficiaries of a will or a court—that audience will have expectations about the document because the writer is reading the document for a particular purpose. The reader may need to understand the subject matter, as in a written objective memorandum. The reader may need to read the document to know whether to do something or refrain from doing something. The purpose of the document is important to structure, but so too is the identity of the reader. A structure proper for a letter to sophisticated opposing counsel may be radically different than one to a client with her first legal problem.

Although the audience and purpose affects organization, well-organized text has identifiable components structured to meet the goals of the communication. Writers aim to present well-developed accessible text. Confusing readers with rambling arguments, tangled paragraphs, and convoluted sentences ensures missing that mark.

The need for organization is clear. Of course, budgets and time pressures may prevent the writer from devoting as much time to a project as the writer would like. But other things cause weak organization. A writer can be in a writing rut, over-using organizational patterns without sufficient adaptation to the current document. Further, if the text presents many ideas, arguments or possibilities, it can quickly become meandering, circuitous and tortuous.

While those obstacles to organization are known, what is often not as widely-recognized is that weak organization happens because a writer does not realize just how dense a document has become. That often happens because as writers become expert in a subject, writers forget the audience is not. The writer may have a...