All 12 Tips for Concision

Since July 2015 I’ve been sporadically posting a series of tips for concision in legal writing. I suggested a total of twelve, and links to all of them are collected here:

1. Don’t fear possessives.

2. Remove redundancy.

3. Diminish sesquipedalian vocabulary. (Reduce big words.)

4. Cut throat-clearing phrases.

5. Eliminate excessive prepositions.

6. Deflate compound prepositions.

7. Omit needless details.

8. Edit for wordiness.

9. Make independent clauses participial phrases.

10. Use pro-verbs or elide verbs.

11. Assess passive voice.

12. Revise unnecessary nominalizations.