Category Archives: Improvement

Tips for Concision: 4. Cut throat-clearing phrases

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Cut throat-clearing phrases.

These are flabby sentence openers that try to manufacture emphasis but just postpone getting to the point. They look this this:

  • It is clear that . . . .
  • It is important to point out that . . . .
  • It would appear to be the case that . . . .
  • A key aspect of this case, which must not be overlooked, is . . . .
  • The Defendant would respectfully draw to the court’s attention that . . . .

And no, I didn’t make this up. Many writing guides advise against “throat-clearers.” Here’s a website.

Why avoid them? They’re “needless buildups” (Garner, The Elements of Legal Style); “merely space-fillers” (LeClercq, Legal Writing Style); and “convey little if any information” (Enquist & Oates, Just Writing).

Your writing will be more concise, and stronger, without them.

_____

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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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Manage your sentence length

What’s a good average sentence length for legal writing?

I once asked a group of lawyers at a CLE seminar that question. “Thirteen words,” one lawyer volunteered. “Seven,” said another. Wow. Writing about legal matters with an average of seven words per sentence isn’t realistic, is it? That means for every sentence of ten words, you’ve got to write one of four words to bring the average to seven. That would be tough.

But the instinct is right. Steven Stark, author of Writing to Win, says the more complex the material, the shorter the sentences should be. So what’s a more realistic goal? The experts say between 20 and 25 words:

  • below 25—Wydick in Plain English for Lawyers
  • about 22—Enquist & Oates in Just Writing: Grammar, Punctuation, and Style for the Legal Writer
  • about 20—Garner in Legal Writing in Plain English

How do you know your average sentence length?

You can program Microsoft Word to tell you. In Word 2010 and 2013, go to File > Options > Proofing and look for “When correcting spelling and grammar in Word.” Now check the box for “Show readability statistics.”

You’ll also be required to check the box for “Check grammar with spelling.” If you dislike running a grammar-check every time you run a spell-check, go into the grammar settings and uncheck as many boxes as you like. You’re telling Word to stop checking for all those grammar items—it gets most of them wrong anyway. (For more on using grammar checker wisely, see Customize Word’s Grammar Checker from the October 2012 Austin Lawyer.)

With those settings, when you finish a spell-check you’ll see a display that includes the average sentence length. Of course, the tool isn’t perfect. If you have citations or headings in your text, Word will think those are sentences—short sentences—and your average sentence length will be artificially low. To work around this problem, select a paragraph or group of paragraphs without headings or citations and then run the spell-check; do it three times in different places. This will give you a sense of your average sentence length.

If your average sentence length is in the 30s, or even the high 20s, you’re taxing your readers. Do a thorough edit for concision and efficiency. If your average sentence length is in the teens, well done. You’re pleasing your readers. And remember, average sentence length doesn’t mean uniform sentence length. You should vary your sentence length. Write some short sentences and some longer ones.

How long is too long?

We lawyers have a reputation for long sentences. It’s probably not all our fault. After all, the subject matter of most legal writing lends itself to qualifications, modifiers, asides, and lists—so we might be forgiven. Yet I’m sure we can do better. Here’s a suggestion: Decide on a maximum sentence length and promise yourself you’ll cut any sentence that exceeds your maximum. For example, mine is 45. I’ve decided that when a single sentence I’ve written exceeds 45 words, it’s an automatic edit.

Of course, some gifted writers can create long sentences that are pleasant to read; they usually use long but perfectly parallel phrases in a series. Or they use lots of semicolons. It can work in literature and, occasionally, in law. But for most of us doing legal writing, long sentences are hard to read and hard to follow. So avoid over-long sentences.

In managing sentence length and avoiding over-long sentences, it’s not practical to count words while you’re typing. Instead, manage sentence length on the edit. As you read your writing, keep an eye out for any sentence that fills three or more lines of text or any sentence that just makes you tired. Use your cursor to select that sentence, and Word will tell you the word count at the bottom left of your screen. For me, if it’s more than 45, it’s an automatic edit.

So that’s the advice. For readable writing that doesn’t tax your readers, vary your sentence length, seek an average in the low 20s, and cut any sentence of 45 words or more.

_____

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What I wish I’d known about legal writing

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1. I wish I’d known that law was a writing profession.

I came to law school thinking law practice was an oral profession. I pictured myself in court, making an argument to the jury or to the judge. I pictured myself seated across the table from another lawyer, negotiating a deal. I pictured myself in my office, meeting with a client to give advice. Sure, lawyers do those things.

But mostly, they write.

Lawyers are professional writers. They get paid to produce quality written work that is subjected to serious scrutiny. I wish I’d known that.

2. I wish I’d known that becoming a good legal writer would take years.
I thought I was a good writer in college. I also thought the basic training I received in law school would enable me to write well in practice. I was wrong.

In Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, he reports on a theory of developing expertise. The theory suggests that it takes 10,000 hours to develop expertise in a particular area. If the theory is right, it certainly applies to legal writing. So if you work 2000 hours per year, and 1000 of those hours are spent writing, becoming an expert legal writer would take you 10 years. That’s a long time.

But it’s not enough to just do the skill for 10,000 hours. You need to work at it—study, learn, and implement what you’ve learned. If you don’t study your craft—if you just write on auto-pilot—it’ll take you more than 10,000 hours. And if you write for fewer than 1000 hours per year, it’ll take you more than 10 years. It could take you 15 or 20. I wish I’d been aware of that long haul.

As an aside to the law students and young lawyers reading this, may I say that I sometimes hear from senior attorneys that law students and young lawyers are ineffective legal writers. This bothers me because it’s unrealistic to expect high-quality legal writing from novices who have spent far fewer than 10,000 hours practicing legal writing. I believe these often misguided complaints arise from two causes: First, some complainers are not expert legal writers themselves and are not in a position to fully judge expert legal writing. Second, some complainers have forgotten how ineffective and inexpert their own legal writing was when they were novices.

So hang in there, young lawyers.

3. I wish I’d known that time pressure would be a significant obstacle to good legal writing.
Law is a busy, demanding profession. Many lawyers feel compelled or are compelled to take on more work than would be ideal. The heavy workload impinges on effective legal writing.

Let’s take editing as an example. If your writing is less than expert, it might be because you don’t know how to edit. Or it might be because you know how to edit, but you’re too lazy to edit. But most often it’s probably because although you know how to edit and you’re hard-working, you don’t have time to edit. Editing is what makes weak writing good and good writing great. But in a busy law practice, careful editing often has to be sacrificed.

4. I wish I’d known about the best sources on good legal writing.
I didn’t own a book on legal writing until I quit practicing law and began teaching legal writing. How could that be? If I’d studied journalism, I would’ve known about and acquired books on writing style. Likewise if I had studied English composition. But I finished law school and entered a writing profession without a single source on legal writing in my library. Sure, I read The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. I read On Writing Well by William Zinsser. But I read no books on legal writing.

Given what was available when I graduated from law school in 1989, I wish I’d had these sources:

  • The Texas Law Review Manual on Usage and Style
  • A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, by Bryan A. Garner
  • How To Write Plain English, by Rudolf Flesch

Somebody should’ve given me one of these as a graduation gift.

Ultimately, I simply wish I had taken the skill of legal writing more seriously. You’re forewarned.

Manage your sentence length

What’s a good average sentence length for legal writing? I once asked a group of lawyers at a CLE seminar that question. “Thirteen words,” one lawyer volunteered. “Seven,” said another. Wow.

Writing about legal matters with an average of seven words per sentence isn’t realistic, is it? That means for every sentence of ten words, you’ve got to write one of four words to bring the average to seven. That would be tough, but the instinct is right. Steven Stark, author of Writing to Win, says the more complex the material, the shorter the sentences should be.

So what’s a more realistic goal? The experts say between 20 and 25 words:

  • below 25—Richard Wydick in Plain English for Lawyers
  • about 22—Enquist & Oates in Just Writing: Grammar, Punctuation, and Style for the Legal Writer
  • about 20—Bryan Garner in Legal Writing in Plain English

How do you know your average sentence length? You can program Microsoft Word to tell you. In Word 2010 and 2013, go to File > Options > Proofing and look for “When correcting spelling and grammar in Word.” Now check the box for “Show readability statistics.”

You’ll also be required to check the box for “Check grammar with spelling.” If you dislike running a grammar-check every time you run a spell-check, go into the grammar settings and uncheck as many boxes as you like. Tell Word to stop checking for all those grammar items—it gets many of them wrong anyway.

Now when you finish a spell-check, you’ll see a display that includes the average sentence length. Of course, the tool isn’t perfect. If you have citations or headings in your text, Word will think those are sentences—short sentences—and your average sentence length will be artificially low. To work around this problem, select a paragraph or group of paragraphs without headings or citations and then run the spell-check; do it three times in different places. This will give you a sense of your average sentence length.

If your average sentence length is in the 30s, or even the high 20s, you’re taxing your readers. Do a thorough edit for concision and efficiency. If your average sentence length is in the teens, well done. You’re pleasing your readers. And remember, average sentence length doesn’t mean uniform sentence length. You should vary your sentence length. Write some short sentences and some longer ones.

But how long is too long? We lawyers have a reputation for long sentences. It’s probably not all our fault. After all, the subject matter of most legal writing lends itself to qualifications, modifiers, asides, and lists—so we might be forgiven. Yet I’m sure we can do better. Here’s a suggestion: Decide on a maximum sentence length and promise yourself you’ll cut any sentence that goes above your maximum. For example, mine is 45. I’ve decided that when a single sentence I’ve written exceeds 45 words, it’s an automatic edit.

Of course, some gifted writers can create long sentences that are pleasant to read; they usually use long but perfectly parallel phrases in a series. Or they use lots of semicolons. It can work in literature. But for most of us doing legal writing, long sentences are hard to read and hard to follow. So avoid over-long sentences.

In managing sentence length and avoiding over-long sentences, it’s not practical to count words while you type. Instead, manage sentence length on the edit. As you read your writing, keep an eye out for any sentence that fills three or more lines of text or any sentence that just makes you tired. Use your cursor to select that sentence, and Word will tell you the word count at the bottom left of your screen. For me, if it’s more than 45, it’s an automatic edit.

So that’s the advice. For readable writing that doesn’t tax your readers, vary your sentence length, seek an average in the low twenties, and cut any sentence of 45 words or more.

_____

To comment on this or any other post, email me.