I recently came across this page collecting a series of articles from the ABA’s Litigation magazine by George Gopen. Their subject is legal writing.
In the first article in the series, Gopen writes:
The bottom-line question about writing quality is simply this: Did the reader get delivery of what the writer was intending to send? If the answer is “yes,” the writing was good enough; if it is “no,” the writing was not good enough. And it matters little how impressive or dazzling the writing seemed to be along the way.
To get control of writing, litigators must understand as much as they can about how the reader goes about the act of reading. It is insufficient to compose a sentence that is capable of being interpreted in the way that best serves your case. Instead you must compose it so the odds are as high as possible that an intelligent reader will be led to interpret it in the way you intended. We have all been taught writing according to what the writer should and should not do. The perspective should be shifted to consider what readers actually do. That will be the task of this series of articles.
Gopen’s top two points:
- readers have an easier time recognizing your sentence’s key points when they appear to come right before periods, colons, and semicolons, and
- readers expect your key sentence’s points to come in the main clause, so you should normally avoid writing, “The Court held that ….”
Provocative and useful, even if (like me) you don’t buy into everything he suggests.
H/T Raymond P. Ward at the (new) legal writer.