A student essay I really liked:
Some nights, I wake up distraught with a demon of meaningless words and terrible run-on sentences frantically circling my brain. This monster comprises of a plurality of semicolons and a non-transitory signal. I can’t escape it, and I surrender, accepting that my brain still bears scars from a foray into the wonderful world of patent prosecution.
The first painful experience I encountered when beginning patent prosecution was vocabulary. Patent prosecution, as can be expected of a form of legal writing, has its own vocabulary. A dictionary consisting of the vocabulary would contain obscure words with usage unique to the patent prosecutor. For example, an embodiment of the invention—for no good patent prosecutor ever allows a single claim to be the invention—might include a hard drive. However, that hard drive is no mere hard drive. Instead, it is a storage medium. Since a storage medium can sometimes take the form of a transitory signal, though, and since transitory signals are non-patentable subject matter, this storage medium must be a non-transitory signal. “Wherein” is another example of the vocabulary of a patent lawyer. “Wherein” is used to provide limitation and description to the element directly preceding it. However, when elements require multiple limitations, serial “wherein” clauses might appear, wherein each clause contains an additional limitation, wherein each limitation is simply painful to read. However, the dictionary would be incomplete with mere definitions and usage instructions.
The new patent prosecutor would also need knowledge of the forbidden words of the patent world. For example, the word “may” adds a level of ambiguity that no good patent lawyer should ever write into a patent application. Accordingly, a Patent Examiner could annihilate any claim containing the word “may” as being too indefinite to be patentable. Similarly, “the invention,” when not accompanied by “embodiment of,” is a phrase to be avoided at all costs. When a Patent Examiner sees “the invention” by itself, he assumes that is the only thing being claimed.
Another rule that all patent lawyers must learn is the strict requirement for using the word “the.” Whenever “the” is used in describing a particular element of a claim, that element must have been mentioned at some point prior to the claim. Regardless of how strange it might look and regardless of whether the element appears only once in an invention, “a” or “an” must be used if it is the first mention of the element. However, vocabulary is not the only source of pain in patent prosecution.
Because of a strange quirk in the way the first patent statutes were drafted, every claim must be one sentence. No matter how many elements are claimed and no matter how long the sentence, the claim must be one sentence. This strict adherence to an idiosyncrasy of drafting leads to an amazing amount of unreadability in patent applications. In addition, letters and numbers, which would provide a sense of stability and structure, are often not used, because they might imply order. The use of commas is inconsistent—Patent Lawyers seem unable to decide whether they want to overuse or underuse this wonderful punctuation mark. Semicolons, on the other hand, are definitely overused. Independent clauses, dependent clauses, words, letters—nothing is safe from the Patent Lawyer’s semicolon. The ridiculous required structure and obscure vocabulary couple to create one of the most torturous treatments of human language that exist in the known world.
Though I have experienced a mere six weeks of reading patents, it is already too late. The specter of patent prosecution haunts me. However, Intellectual Property Law is my chosen path. Therefore, I must accept the realities of the situation and move on. This is an area where a writing expert could truly shine a light of revelation. I hope that one day an expert does.