Category Archives: Humor

And you think legal writing is bad?

My books: Legal Writing Nerd: Be One, Plain Legal Writing: Do It.

Operations within the Sector Franchise Fund were impacted by the June 20, 2018, AS-PTT Memorandum, Customer Approval Process for the Sector Business Center, directing AOD to divest external customers, as well as the review and denial of particular requests for assisted acquisition support from external customers including the planned divestiture of AOD’s 5 largest customers: TARCA, CARCA, TICOM, VCDo, and DOTS&R.

In response to the AS-PTT direction and review process, AOD did not conduct its usual business development efforts, existing customers were confused by the approval process and lost confidence in AOD’s ability to continue to perform assisted acquisition support for external customers, AOD’s hiring freeze led to 40 departures which have not been backfilled impacting the ability to seek and perform new work and certain existing customers did not send additional work to AOD.

Overall, FY 2018 AOD actions decreased 9% and obligations decreased 22.5% over FY 2017 and Quarter 3 and 4 revenue within the EFFL represented a $16.8M decrease in FY 2018 compared to FY 2017. Disapproval of requested acquisition support led to a direct loss of $5.1-$5.9M (Tab A) in revenue for AOD. Additional revenue was likely lost due to existing and potential customers not reaching out to AOD for support as rumors that AOD would no longer be servicing external customers circulated in the shared service community. As a result, AOD generated less revenue than projected, expenses slightly exceeded revenue, the EFFL Annual Reserve was funded below optimal levels and AOD did not generate enough revenue to contribute to the Sector Franchise Fund Capital Improvement Reserve.

  • Average sentence length = 43 words
  • Flesch Reading Ease Score = 0.0 (scale of 0-100 with 60 being “plain”)
  • Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level = 24 (high school plus 12 years of education)
My books: Legal Writing Nerd: Be One, Plain Legal Writing: Do It.

Writing knowledge is like an onion

Level 0 writers think nothing of writing:

  • The lawyer that argued the case …

Level 1 writers have learned enough to believe that one must always refer to a person with personal pronouns (and never with that or it), and so they write:

  • The lawyer who argued the case …

Level 2 writers have looked up this topic and read enough reliable sources to know that there is no such rule, that using that for a person is a widespread and historically common usage, and that it’s primarily misguided sticklers who try to prohibit it; so they go ahead and write:

  • The lawyer that argued the case …

Level 3 writers believe that enough misguided sticklers are in their reading audience that it’s worth conforming to the nonrule to avoid creating the even the mistaken impression of an error; so they write:

  • The lawyer who argued the case …

Level 4 writers have enough confidence in their own writing credibility that they focus on producing clear, readable prose in their own voice; they don’t manipulate the prose to conform to nonrules enforced by misguided sticklers; I don’t know what they would write. 

Legal Writing Nerd: Be One

A legal-writing teacher walks into a bar . . .

TexasBarToday_TopTen_Badge_Small

A period walks into a bar and comes to a full stop.
A semicolon walks into a bar; almost no one recognizes it.
A question mark walks into a bar?
Two quotation marks “walk” into a bar.
An apostrophe mistakenly walks into it’s own bar, but the apostrophe meant to go to another owners bar.
A comma splice walks into a bar, it orders a drink and then leaves.
Two independent clauses walk into a bar, however they fail to get properly separated and run on into each other.
A dangling modifier walks into a bar. After finishing a drink, the bartender asks it to leave.
Because a fragment walked into a bar.
An ellipsis walks into a bar and …
An infinitive walks into a bar and decides to quickly split.
A non-restrictive clause walks into a bar which was a mistake.
A bar is a place a preposition can walk into.
A spell-checker woks in to a bar.
A synonym strolls into a tavern.
An exclamation mark skips into a bar!
A bar was visited by the passive voice.