With help from the library staff at Cooley Law School, I conducted an experiment. Randomly take 100 federal cases, 50 from the courts of appeals and 50 from the district […]
Law & Culture
An occasional extra-short sentence or fragment can serve various purposes. Most obviously, it can provide variety and emphasis. It can also be useful for breaking up a long sentence, setting up a conclusion, linking to a new topic—any number of things, really.
Law & Culture
In the previous column, I said that unnecessary prepositional phrases are perhaps the single biggest cause of sentence-level verbosity in legal writing […]
Law & Culture
Law & Culture
In a very short browse on Westlaw, I found some sentences that, in my view, would be improved by contractions: […]
Law & Culture
Since I didn’t wipe them out the first time (Summer 2018), I am reloading. Multiword prepositions—also called compound or complex or phrasal prepositions—are among the most noxious and pervasive small-scale faults in legal writing. […]
Law & Culture
This isn’t the first time I’ve gone after unnecessary dates and procedural detail. (See the Autumn 2017 and Summer 2018 columns.) And it probably won’t be the last.
Law & Culture
We all know that legal writing could benefit from more periods. A strong contender for the second most neglected punctuation mark in legal writing is the em-dash, the long dash.
Law & Culture
Signposting is easy to illustrate. Not this: “The defendant claims . . . . The defendant also claims . . . . Finally, the defendant claims . . . .” […]
Court Administration
First, a technical distinction: an acronym is pronounced as a word (“scuba” = self-contained underwater breathing apparatus); an initialism is pronounced letter by letter (“IBM”). Informally, “acronym” is often used for […]
