Tips for Concision: 4. Cut throat-clearing phrases

TexasBarToday_TopTen_Badge_Small

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.

_____

To comment, email me.

Tips for Concision: 3. Diminish sesquipedalian vocabulary

TexasBarToday_TopTen_Badge_Small

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

TexasBarToday_TopTen_Badge_Small

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.

_____

Want to comment? Email me. I’ve had to disable comments because of excessive spam.

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.

_____

Want to comment? Email me. I’ve had to disable comments because of excessive spam.

Recommended book: The New 1L

I recommend a new book from Carolina Academic Press:

The New 1L: First-Year Lawyering with Clients

edited by Eduardo R.C. Capulong, Michael A. Millemann, Sara Rankin, and Nantiya Ruan.

From the publisher’s online catalog:

In The New 1L, leading teachers in the field describe how, in the first year of legal education, they teach students to act, as well as think, like lawyers. In their courses, clients are central—not extraneous. Working under a lawyer’s supervision, students interview clients, conduct factual investigations, draft pleadings, and write memoranda and briefs. The authors argue that, in isolation, theory and practice are incomplete, and first-year educators must integrate the two. They discuss the benefits and challenges of this new 1L approach, and also provide a range of successful models for any teacher who wants to adapt this pedagogy to a first-year course.

The innovative courses the authors describe bring about collaborations between classroom instruction and legal research and writing (LRW) and create interactions with clinical teachers and lawyers. These collaborative teaching models are essential to the future success of legal education, the authors contend. These models include LRW courses that base assignments on actual legal work, core courses that add practice components to traditional theoretical instruction, courses adding skills instruction and actual client work to the 1L curriculum, and courses that invite 1L students to enroll in clinics.