Category Archives: Improvement

Customize Word’s Grammar Checker

Do you use Microsoft Word’s grammar checker? I’ve asked hundreds of lawyers at CLE seminars over the years, and the near-unanimous answer is no. I hear muttered words like “useless,” and “stupid.”

I agree—if you run the grammar check with the default settings.

About half the suggestions it offers will be just plain wrong. Most of the rest will be things you know but don’t want to change. So it’s useless, right?

There’s a better way to use the grammar checker: reject the default settings and customize a handful of your own preferences or areas to improve. Word’s grammar checker does only a few things well, so don’t waste time using the default settings. Instead, use a few settings to help you.

To customize it, in Word 2010 go to File > Options > Proofing. Then look for “When correcting grammar and spelling in Word.” Check the box for “Check grammar with spelling.” Now set the Writing Style drop-down to Grammar & Style and click on Settings. There you’ll see what the grammar checker is checking. (Note: I hate the green squiggles, so I’ve unchecked “Mark grammar errors as you type.”)

Here’s the most important step: check only a few items you care about. (This means unchecking most of the boxes.) Now when you run a spell check, Word will also check grammar but will highlight only the items you checked. What’s more, for every grammar item it highlights, Word offers an explanation—though not all the explanations are helpful. Just click on “Explain.”

Some settings to consider.

Do you over-use the passive voice? Check the box for “passive sentences.” Word’s grammar checker is good at spotting passive voice, and although there are justifiable uses, many legal writers lapse into passive voice too often. For example, when I run a grammar check with “passive sentences” checked, I end up changing about half my passive sentences to active. That’s a worthwhile setting.

Haven’t mastered that versus which? Check the box for “relative clauses.” Word does a pretty good job of identifying that-which errors. By running a few tests, I surmised that it’s just looking for which without a preceding comma, but I wasn’t able to fool it into marking a correct use as incorrect. Naturally, it suggests adding a comma or switching to that, so you have to figure out what you mean. Still, it’s great practice if you haven’t mastered the difference.

Need help with possessives and plurals? Even if you know the difference between judges and judge’s, we all make unintended typos. Check the box and Word might save you some embarrassment.

Some settings you might want to avoid.

Prone to long sentences? Word offers only limited help. Check the box for “sentence length,” and Word will tell you when a sentence is 60 words or longer—a pretty high threshold and well beyond my own guideline of 45. In other words, I think a sentence of more than 45 words needs revision or division. But Word won’t prompt you to revise until 60. Not even at 59. I tried it.

Need help with fragments informal tone? Probably not. Although Word is good at finding sentence fragments, first person, and contractions, those are easy to spot and easy to avoid in formal writing. Leave those boxes unchecked. Word is also good at highlighting and or but at the beginning of a sentence and at spotting split infinitives. But most of us can spot those on our own or don’t consider them mistakes at all. Leave those boxes unchecked, too.

Commas? Word is terrible at commas; it can’t tell a series from a compound sentence from a parenthetical insertion. I leave the box for “punctuation” unchecked. And I’ve never been able to figure out what Word is really looking for with Wordiness. When I clicked on Explain, it told me to avoid “there is” and “there are.” Fair enough, but the highlighted sentence contained neither. Uncheck the box.

_____

So it’s possible to make grammar checker a little less useless and even a little useful, but you have to take control. Don’t accept the default settings. Check or uncheck the settings as you prefer. You’ll probably keep just a few checked, so you won’t waste time with a tedious, full grammar check, but you’ll get a focused look at a few of your weaknesses.

Lawyers are Professional Writers

For three main reasons, you, as a lawyer, are a professional writer.

1. Lawyers are paid to write.
That takes you out of amateur status. And most of us don’t write a little. We write a lot. I remember when I began working at a law firm that I was surprised at how much writing there was. “Gosh,” I thought. “Why didn’t anyone tell me I was going to be doing so much was writing?” If writing is a significant part of your job, you’re a professional writer.

2. Lawyers’ writing deals with complex topics and affects rights, money, and liberty.
Usually, there’s a lot riding on your writing: your client’s money, your client’s rights and, in the criminal setting, your client’s liberty or even life. If writing with that kind of pressure weren’t enough, there’s the complexity of the subject matter. The law is complicated, and writing about complex topics with a lot at stake is demanding work. Grasping the complex subject matter and writing about it effectively are the hallmarks of a professional writer—a lawyer.

3. Lawyers’ written work is subject to serious scrutiny.
Legal writing gets scrutinized and criticized (not to mention satirized). Your legal documents can end up in front of multiple audiences, and each has a chance to evaluate your writing.

Your supervisor, who can hire and fire, promote and demote, gets to inspect your writing.
Opposing counsel gets paid to find your mistakes—sort of a professional writing critic.
Your client, the one paying you to write, can examine your writing, of course.
And in litigation the judge is, well, judging it.

Writing getting that much scrutiny is professional writing.

Convinced? I hope so. If not, go read The Lawyer’s Guide to Writing Well, by Goldstein and Lieberman. It convinced me lawyers are professional writers. Once you’re convinced, you can take some steps to act like a professional writer. That idea is a theme of The Lawyer’s Guide to Writing Well: lawyers are professional writers, and they should act like it.

Act like a professional writer.
Professional writers consult writing references, and lawyers should, too. I recommend The Redbook, by Garner, but there are others: Just Writing by Oates and Enquist and the Texas Law Review Manual on Usage & Style. Once you’ve started using a writing reference, try to get others to do it. Having a reliable and consistent source for answering writing questions will raise the writing IQ of everyone in your office.

Professional writers continue to learn. For lawyers, that could mean attending a legal-writing CLE. Better yet, you could volunteer to present a legal-writing CLE. A great way to improve your writing knowledge is to write a paper about legal writing and then teach a class about it. Continuing to learn could also mean reading books about writing. I’ve recommended many in this column, but here are two gems I’ve never mentioned: On Writing Well by Zinsser; Legal Writing: Sense and Nonsense by Mellinkoff.

Professional writers use editors. Lawyers need them too. You have several options, from more expensive to less expensive. You could hire an in-house editor or writing specialist (expensive). You could have every lawyer in the office attend training on copy editing (moderate). Or you could ask a trusted colleague to edit your writing (less expensive). Whatever you do, remember what professional writers know: bad writing becomes good and good writing becomes great only by editing.

Here’s one more idea: start a writing group. Select or invite a group of lawyers to meet over lunch once a week to discuss good writing. Have everyone take a turn offering a document for the group to read in advance and then discuss at the meeting. You’ll get two benefits: the writing IQ of everyone in the group is bound to increase, and you’ll learn that accepting constructive feedback is a great way to improve your writing.

And improving is part of being a professional writer.