Author Archives: Wayne Schiess

About Wayne Schiess

Wayne Schiess teaches basic legal writing at the University of Texas School of Law and also focuses on legal drafting, persuasion, and plain English. He is a frequent CLE and seminar speaker on those subjects and has written dozens of articles on practical legal-writing skills, plus four books. He graduated from Cornell Law School, practiced law for three years at the Texas firm of Baker Botts, and in 1992 joined the faculty at Texas. In 2012 and 2015, he was named the law school's legal-writing teacher of the year. In 2011, the Texas Pattern Jury Charges Plain Language Project, for which he was the drafting consultant, was named a finalist for a ClearMark Award by the Center for Plain Language. In 2009, five of his short articles were featured in the Scribes Journal of Legal Writing "Best of" series. In 2007, this legal-writing blog (LEGIBLE) was selected for the ABA Journal Blawg 100: "The best Websites by lawyers for lawyers."

Justice Gorsuch’s first opinion shows his style

If you search “Neil Gorsuch writing,” you’ll find a number of sources describing new Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch as a strong writer, a writer with flair, a writer with style. Justice Gorsuch has now written his first opinion for the Supreme Court, in this case: Henson v. Santander Consumer USA, Inc. After reading it carefully and using some MS Word tools to assess it, I offer a few observations about Justice Gorsuch’s writing style.

Stripped of extraneous text and citations, the opinion has about 3000 words and 120 sentences, for an average of 25 words per sentence. That’s a good and readable average for legal writing, as I’ve written here before. The Flesch Reading Ease score is 44. That’s excellent because Supreme Court opinions average around 31.¹ (The higher the number, the more readable the text.) And the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is 13, meaning a first-year college student should be able to understand the text. That’s pretty good too because Supreme Court opinions average about 14.5.² Granted, the subject matter of the opinion—who’s a debt collector under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act—wasn’t complex, and these statistical measures aren’t terribly meaningful, but they at least suggest that Justice Gorsuch tries to write readably.

Two other choices also convey the impression of a thoughtful writer who tries to write readably: Of his 120 sentences, he began 20 with a coordinating conjunction: and, or, for, but, yet, so. That’s a technique of an informal, readable style. So is using contractions, and Gorsuch used 17.

Justice Gorsuch has a few other writing preferences I find interesting.

He rarely uses traditional transition words (conjunctive adverbs) like however, moreover, furthermore, therefore, nevertheless, additionally, and so on. In fact, other than two uses of however, there are none.

Instead, he uses coordinating conjunctions, as mentioned, but he also uses phrases rather than single words, like these, all of which appear at the beginning of sentences:

Before attending to that job, though,
To the contrary,
By this point
Given that,
After all,
After all and again,
In the end,

But just as many of his transitions and cues appear mid-sentence, rather than at the beginning:

These results follow, the parties tell us, because . . .
Petitioners did not, however, raise . . .
In another subsection, too, Congress . . .
You might, for example, take . . .
This exclusion, petitioners now suggest, implies . . .
Legislation is, after all, the . . .

More thoughts to come . . .

_____

1. Lance N. Long, William F. Christensen, When Justices (Subconsciously) Attack: The Theory of Argumentative Threat and the Supreme Court, 91 Or. L. Rev. 933, 950 (2013)

2. See id. at 949.

Collective Nouns: Singular or Plural?

A collective noun refers to a group of people or things. Group, for example, is a collective noun. Legal writers often have to deal with collective nouns, and here are some of the most common: board, council, court, faculty, government, jury, majority, panel, and staff. When using collective nouns, writers occasionally face questions of subject-verb agreement and pronoun agreement. This post addresses both.

Subject-verb agreement

The key question is whether to treat collective nouns as singular or plural. Should we write the jury is or the jury are? Although a jury, like all collective nouns, is a group of individuals, the better practice is to treat collective nouns as singular and to write the jury is, as well as the council decides, the panel hears, and so on.

But the experts agree that it’s not always that simple. According to Bryan Garner, in the United States, we usually treat collective nouns as a singular unit and use the singular verb. “But if the emphasis is on the individuals in the group, the plural verb form is best.”¹ The editors of Merriam-Webster’s English Usage Dictionary agree: “[W]hen the group is considered as a unit, the singular verb is used; when it is thought of as a collection of individuals, the plural verb is used.”²

By the way, British English is different, and I won’t address it here except to say that when I watch a football match (soccer game) with British commentators, it’s always jarring to hear them say, “Chelsea’s team are very talented.”

So in the Unites States, if you’re writing about faculty, you might write this:

a. The faculty [as a singular entity] gratefully acknowledges the assistance of volunteer judges.

But this:

b. The faculty [individually] are of different minds on the subject of pass-fail courses.

Another example:

c. The consultant will study how staff [as a singular entity] in rural hospitals gathers and evaluates the performance of doctors with clinical privileges.

But then this:

d. The staff in rural hospitals [individually] create performance-assessment reports.

As you can see, it can be tricky to decide if you’re thinking of a collective noun singularly or individually, and even more tricky to decide how your reader will perceive it. That’s why the safest practice is to treat collective nouns as singular entities that take singular verbs and to do so consistently within any one document.

A frequent and widely recommended work-around is to use “members” or “members of,” which clarifies the proper verb. So the jury was seated in the hallway becomes the members of the jury were seated in the hallway. And the board meets on the first Thursday becomes the board members meet on the first Thursday. This work-around is useful even if it causes a small loss of concision.

Pronoun agreement

If collective nouns are generally singular, they should take the pronouns it and its, not they, them, or their.

Wrong: The council needed to review the transcript before they could vote.
Right: The council needed to review the transcript before it could vote.

Treating a court as plural is a fairly common error among novice legal writers:

Wrong: The court must first determine whether they have jurisdiction.
Right: The court must first determine whether it has jurisdiction.

This error might arise from the perception that intermediate appellate courts often hear cases in panels of three and that highest courts often hear cases as a body of nine. Yet the court is a singular entity, no matter how many judges make it up. If the writer is thinking of the judges individually, it would be better to write this: The judges must first determine if they have jurisdiction.

Collective nouns are generally singular and take singular verbs and pronouns. If you think you have an exception, go ahead, but use your best editorial judgment and get a second opinion.

[1] Bryan A. Garner, Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage 172 (3d ed. 2011).

[2] Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage 257 (1994).

Hyphenating Pre-fixes

Should we write pre-trial or pretrial? Non-statutory or nonstatutory? Co-sponsor or cosponsor?

As legal writers, we often have to decide whether to use a hyphen for a prefix. By the way, no hyphen in prefix, despite the hyphen in the title; I was just being clever. In this post I’ll discuss the default rule for hyphenating prefixes as well as the exceptions. (FYI: This blog breaks words at the right margin and inserts hyphens I can’t control. Sorry.)

The default rule is to omit most hyphens: pretrial, nonstatutory, cosponsor. According to Joan Magat in The Lawyer’s Editing Manual, the same rule applies to multiracial, nongovernmental, semiliterate, and underutilize. Even when the result is a doubled letter, omitting the hyphen is generally correct, according to Bryan Garner’s Redbook. So interrelate, misspell, overrate, posttrial, preempt, and reelect. Omitting the hyphen can produce words your spell-checker doesn’t recognize, but “they are nonetheless correct,” according to June Casagrande in The Best Punctuation Book, Period.

Now the exceptions.

Certain prefixes always take a hyphen, and Magat and Garner agree on four that require a hyphen in legal writing: all-, ex-, quasi-, and self-. So all-encompassing, all-knowing, ex-convict, ex-president, quasi-contract, quasi-public, self-assessment, and self-serving.

When the prefix precedes a capital letter or a numeral, use a hyphen. Casagrande, Garner, and Magat agree on this: non-American, anti-Semitic, post-1986, and pre-9/11.

Bring in a hyphen when omitting it could create a miscue, an ambiguity, or confusion—because the unhyphenated word looks like another word:

Judge Kean spent most of her pre-judicial career at Lowery & Townes.
Forbes rejected the Petitioner’s request to re-sign the contract.
The incident resulted from an unexpected re-formation of river ice.
Andrick’s video was meant to re-create the events at issue.

The experts also recommend a hyphen when omitting it could create an awkward or hard-to-pronounce compound. Here you must exercise editorial judgment; as you’ll see, the experts’ examples aren’t always consistent with other guidance. Here are the examples the experts say should be hyphenated:

Casagrande: anti-inclusive, intra-arterial, ultra-apathetic
Garner: anti-intellectual, post-sentencing, pro-abstinence
Magat: co-opt, co-worker, non-odious

Thus, we’ve arrived at our guidelines for hyphenating prefixes.

A no-hyphen approach is preferred, with three exceptions: (1) with all-, ex-, quasi-, and self; (2) before numerals and capital letters; and (3) to avoid awkwardness—exercising your best editorial judgment.

For detailed guidance, see The Chicago Manual of Style § 7.79, which is followed in § 7.85 by a 9-page table table with rules for hyphenating specific prefixes and words. Magat’s book, The Lawyer’s Editing Manual, also contains a list of prefixes that are generally unhyphenated, with exceptions.

Formatting suggestions for court opinions

Practitioners must follow court rules for their pleadings and briefs, but courts can do what they want. Here are my suggestions for formatting court orders and opinions. For more and better guidance, see Matthew Butterick, Typography for Lawyers (2d ed. 2015) or his website.

Don’t use Courier. I recommend a serifed typeface for the body text (my example uses Cambria), and I follow the recommendations of many layout experts to avoid Times New Roman. I believe it’s appropriate to format short, topic headings in a contrasting sans serif font (my example uses Calibri Bold).

Although double line spacing is ubiquitous in legal documents, it’s problematic for on-screen skimming and readability and because it uses lots of paper if printed. Some say double-spacing makes documents readable. Yet no one reads double-spaced books, magazines, or newspapers, let alone web pages. Instead, apply reasonable line spacing (my example uses 1.2) and push in the left-right margins to reduce the line length (my example uses 1.5 inches).

Use only one tab to indent paragraphs, and consider shortening the tab (my example uses .25 inches).

If you want full justification, you should turn on hyphenation to reduce gaps and spaces (my example does). If you dislike hyphens, check out most newspapers and magazines and nearly all books: they’re hyphenated. If you still dislike hyphens, left justified text with a ragged right margin is fine for legal documents, I say.

Use italics instead of underlining. Avoid ALL-CAPS.

Add text to the outline numbers. You can use topical headings: Introduction. You can also use explanatory headings (point headings): The structure and punctuation of Maine’s wage-and-hour law creates an ambiguity.

And if you can bring yourself to do it, abandon Roman numerals and, possibly, use a numbering system that allows readers to know where they are at any point in the document. It might look like this:

1.
1a.
1b.
2
2a.
2b.
3.
4.

Here is my reformatted example (click to view):

Old, dysfunctional layout of judicial opinions

You’ve probably heard about that “serial comma case,” O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy. The decision, Judge Barron of the First Circuit tells us, was based on the absence of a serial comma, which is the second comma here: red, white, and blue. For punctuation nerds, it’s an interesting case, and I hope to write more about it.

For now, I encourage you to read the opinion in its original format. Why? Because it’s outdated, dysfunctional, and annoying. At least that’s what I think. Here are my reasons.

The opinion—

uses Courier 12 point, a monospaced, typewriter font that’s ugly and old
uses double line spacing, so on-screen readers scroll twice as much, paper readers turn twice as many pages (not to mention using more paper to print it), and all readers lose a degree of visual understanding because paragraph breaks and large-scale formatting cues are farther apart
uses 2 tabs to indent the first line of each paragraph; older lawyers might remember when this was a common practice—I worked for lawyers who did it (in 1989)—but it’s typographically dysfunctional and just looks odd
uses full justification without hyphenation at the right margin; full justification can look good if done well—it’s how most books and other professional publications are laid out—but if it’s done poorly and without hyphenation in a monospaced font like Courier, it looks terrible: gappy and unprofessional, with white space splattered randomly on the page
uses underlining instead of italics, so if it was meant to look like it was typed on a typewriter, it succeeds
uses 1.2-inch left-right margins, which is better than standard 1-inch but a bit small; the line length (number of characters from left margin to right) is still too long
uses numbered sections without text—no descriptive headings and no explanatory headings; you know how the table of contents in a brief gives the reader a preview of the writer’s argument outline? Well this is what the court’s table of contents would look like:

I
II
III
A
B
IV
A
B
C
V
VI

That isn’t helpful.

Readers can probably infer from my critique what the preferred formatting practices would be, but I’ll go over them next week.