Monthly Archives: July 2015

Tips for Concision: 3. Diminish sesquipedalian vocabulary

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Reduce big words

Sesquipedalian (sesqui + ped) means a foot and a half long, and it’s exactly the kind of word to avoid. Unless you need a term of art or a legal word, your writing will be more concise and more readable if you use an everyday word instead of a fancy one.

So change ascertain to learn, commence to start, and request to ask.

For more ideas, check out Joseph Kimble’s list (available online) in the Michigan Bar Journal: Joseph Kimble, Plain Words, 80 Mich. B.J. 72 (Aug. 2001).

As you edit, root out words that are ostentatious (fancy), abstruse (hard), and infrequent (rare). Don’t write

She indicated she had previously encountered this conundrum

when you could write

She said she had faced this problem before.

But wait. Lawyers are smart and are used to reading and using sesquipedalian vocabulary. So if we’re capable of handling big words, why should we use small ones? Why should we dumb down our writing?

Let me be clear: to write concisely you don’t need to limit your own vocabulary. In fact, the larger your vocabulary, the better a writer you’re likely to be. As Rudolf Flesch said, it’s not about knowing big words; it’s about using them:

So if you have a big vocabulary and know a lot of rare and fancy words, that’s fine. Be proud of your knowledge. It’s important in reading and in learning. But when it comes to using your vocabulary, don’t throw those big words around where they don’t belong. . . . It’s a good rule to know as many rare words as possible for your reading, but to use as few of them as possible in your writing.

Rudolf Flesch, How to Write Better 25, 35 (1951).

More to come.

Tips for Concision: 2. Remove redundancy

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Remove redundancy.

I’ll ignore stock contract-drafting phrases like above and foregoing, agree and covenant, save and except, and others. They might need pruning, but I’ll focus here on analytical legal writing (memos, motions, briefs, reports, letters, e-mail).

Some redundancies are obvious: new innovations, past history, unexpected surprise. As you edit, look for these and remove them, of course. But other redundancies can be harder to spot; you’ll need to have your redundancy antenna up as you edit. Look at this sentence:

  • Isam Yasar alleged that in a conversation, his supervisor, Russell Dunagan, told him to stop complaining.

Here, conversation and told convey the same idea—they’re redundant. So unless the conversation itself is a key fact, removing that redundancy will shorten the sentence from 15 words to 12:

  • Isam Yasar alleged that his supervisor, Russell Dunagan, told him to stop complaining.

More to come.

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Tips for Concision: 1. Don’t fear possessives

Don’t fear possessives.

Why do we write this way?

  • the vehicle of the defendant
  • the property of the seller
  • the intent of the testator

It’s probably just habit or imitating the sound of legal writing in our heads. But those five-word phrases could be shortened to three:

  • the defendant’s car
  • the seller’s property
  • the testator’s intent

Are some legal writers avoiding possessives out of a fear of making an apostrophe mistake? Or out of a sense that possessives are informal (like contractions, which also use apostrophes)? Probably not, but let’s be clear: Possessive forms are not informal. Use them to improve concision.

A few legal writers were taught that inanimate things cannot possess—that it’s wrong to write the book’s title, the nation’s capital, or the chair’s leg. Instead, we must write the title of the book, the capital of the nation, and the leg of the chair. If it sounds a bit odd to you, you’re right. There’s no such rule, and those who promoted this idea were misconstruing the grammatical term “possessive.” In fact, a better term for “possessive” is “genitive case,” which carries no connotation of ownership. See Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage 475 (1994).

Occasionally the of form is preferable; you’ll write sentences in which intent of the testator just fits better or conveys your intended meaning more clearly. So I’m not offering a rule or a universally mandated edit. Just one technique to improve concision.

More to come.

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