I’m pleased to announce that Professor Louis Sirico of Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law is the 2016 winner of the Burton Award for outstanding contributions to legal-writing education.
Professor Sirico is a long-time and staunch supporter of legal-writing education and of legal-writing teachers and is admired for his work in the field.
He is also, by the way, a graduate of The University of Texas School of Law. Well done, Lou!
Wordiness would cover most of the concision techniques discussed in this series, such as omit needless details, deflate compound prepositions, and remove redundancy, but now let’s focus on commonly used phrases you can almost always shorten:
Want more?
To achieve concision, edit for wordiness—and then reduce big words while you’re at it:
then–
In English, the infinitive is a verb form constructed with to + the verb root, as in to read, to write, and to edit. The supposed rule against splitting an infinitive says you must not insert an adverb between to and the verb root; thus, these constructions break the rule:
The no-split “rule” likely began as a misguided effort by early English grammarians to make English like Latin, in which the infinitive is a single word, like scribere (to write) and is therefore unsplit-able. If you can’t split infinitives in Latin, these early writers thought, then you mustn’t in English.
But English isn’t Latin. Manifestum est. In English, we have greater flexibility in placing adverbs to create desired tone and emphasis. So the “rule” is really a suggestion, and many experts say so:
“The principle of allowing split infinitives is broadly accepted as both normal and useful.” Oxford A–Z Guide to English Usage.
“It’s fine to split infinitives…. certainly don’t let anyone tell you it’s forbidden.” Mignon Fogarty in Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.
“Split infinitives … have long been an effective way to avoid awkward writing.” Jan Venolia in Write Right!
“It is permissible to split an infinitive.” Joan Magat in The Lawyer’s Editing Manual.
“There is no ‘rule’ in English about split infinitives—just the common-sense suggestion that adverbs should be placed where they sound best.” Terri LeClercq in Expert Legal Writing.
Yet after consulting a dozen sources in preparing to write this piece, I will candidly report that the predominant advice is to avoid splitting infinitives when you can. This means avoid splitting unless avoiding the split is awkward. In other words—and this is my opinion—this non-rule still has enough force that even experts who acknowledge there is no such rule advise you to follow the nonrule when you can.
My advice? Trust your ear and split the infinitive whenever splitting sounds natural to you. Although legal writing can’t always be modeled on speech, this is one area where you should write it the way you would say it.
For example, I gladly split the infinitive here:
And I would never write this strained, split-infinitive work-around:
(It’s ambiguous, too: what’s careful, the asking or the reading?)
But avoiding the split would be simple and wouldn’t result in awkwardness or loss of emphasis:
That’s a safe course if you think your reader might be a no-splitter.
Consider this awkward un-split infinitive:
For me, the phrase to locate instantly and focus on is confusing. It would be better to write this:
How about this un-split infinitive:
I get a miscue here: to access quickly identified portions. What are the “quickly identified portions”? This is better:
One more thing. Some writers take the non-rule against splitting infinitives and apply it to all verb phrases, which would mean you must not insert an adverb between an auxiliary verb and the main verb. Applying such a rule would mean verb phrases like will execute, be convinced, and have demonstrated could not be split. So all these would be wrong:
Please.
Don’t worry about splitting verb phrases. Besides the absence of a genuine rule, there’s the awkwardness of the work-arounds, as in this example I recently read:
I hope you’ll agree the split version is more natural:
Ultimately, the split infinitive “has become a matter of minor concern,” according to Tom MacArthur in The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. It ought to stay that way. If you trust your ear, you’ll probably split more than not, and that’s fine.
After all, there’s no rule against splitting an infinitive.
What advice would you give a new lawyer about legal writing?
I’ll be writing and presenting on this question in February, and I’d appreciate your views.
I think of things like “develop good editing habits,” “try to get drafts done early,” and “read a reference book once in a while.” But I’d like to hear from practicing lawyers.
Regular readers know that I keep comments disabled because I get thousands of spam comments. But the comments are open for this.
-Wayne
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.