the (new) legal writer

Writng advice from the invisible gorilla

Dan Simons, of Invisible Gorilla fame, has a useful list of writing tips, including an editing checklist. You can find a link to Dan’s tips here. It’s meant for scientific writing, but it can be adapted to any form of expository prose. Just remember that Dan’s tips are general guidelines, not absolute rules.

For those unacquainted with the invisible gorilla, take this video test.

Presents? Thank you very — oh.

Every time I see the silly phrase “Know all men by these presents,” I think of Christmas. Perhaps a statement the Magi wanted to make about their presents for the Christ child. Nevertheless, I’m no expert on drafting contracts: on that subject, I defer to Ken Adams, who riffs on the silly phrase in this post.

Can I get a witnesseth?

The history of “nimrod”

How did “Nimrod,” the name of a biblical character, become an insult? Blame Bugs Bunny. As Mark Nichol explains at Daily Writing Tips:

In a Looney Tunes cartoon featuring Bugs’s fumbling nemesis Elmer Fudd as a hunter on the rabbit’s trail, the carrot-chomping coney sardonically refers to Fudd as a nimrod — insulting him by derisively comparing him to a biblical personage renowned for his hunting skills. Apparently, later generations of Looney Tunes fans who hadn’t kept up with their Scripture picked up on Bugs’s attitude without understanding the ironic allusion, and the word acquired a new meaning, while its original sense faded into the background.

“I see decedents.” — The Sixth Sense (by a literate lawyer)

Legal writers often confuse decedent with descendant. So let’s get these two almost-homonyms straight. The decedent is dead. The decedent’s surviving progeny are descendants. A good way to keep these words straight is to remember that descendant is related to the verb descend.

When to use passive voice

When should passive voice be used? George Gopen can think of five instances. (Hat tip to Stephanie West Allen.)

You can start a sentence with any part of speech

Recycled from a comment to this post, answering the question whether it’s okay to start a sentence with a conjunction:

Of course it’s okay. I’ll take it a step further: no part of speech is disqualified as the first word of a sentence. For instance:

Noun: John kicked the ball.
Verb: Get ready.
Adjective: Dark clouds formed.
Adverb: Merrily we rolled along.
Preposition: Of course it’s okay. (It’s also okay to end a sentence with a preposition, but that’s a topic for another post.
Conjunction: And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field,
keeping watch over their flock by night. (Luke 2:8, King James Version)

Oh, and you can start a sentence with an interjection too.

Why you must be upfront with adverse authority.

If you’re not, someone like Judge Posner may slam you in full color.

Quotation of the day: On stating the issue

West’s headnote of the day:

In the statement of the issues on appeal, every ground of appeal ought to be so distinctly stated that the reviewing court may at once see the point which it is called upon to decide without having to “grope in the dark” to ascertain the precise point at issue.

Jones v. Lott, 692 S.E.2d 900 (S.C. 2010).

Use parallel structure to remove ambiguity.

I regularly read Thy Will Be Done for spiritual inspiration. Today that wonderful blog also provided a little writing lesson. Today’s post included this sentence:

We might accept the Savior as the one who helps, but we’re afraid to mention his name and remain silent.

That last clause, “remain silent,” is ambiguous, or at least can cause a miscue. Does it mean that we remain silent, or that we’re afraid to remain silent? From the context, we can figure out that the former is what the writer means. But for expository prose, a sentence that can be figured out isn’t as good as a sentence that doesn’t need figuring out. To eliminate the need to figure out this sentence, we need to add only one word and one punctuation mark:

We might accept the Savior as the one who helps, but we’re afraid to mention his name, and we remain silent.

Notice what we’re doing here. We use parallel structure to put “remain silent” on the same level as “are afraid.”

Nobody’s perfect

Every now and then, I’ll make a boo-boo on this blog. Gentle readers have let me know, for example, when I’ve confused its with it’s, or then with than. Stuff like that happens when you work without an editor, as every blogger does. John McIntyre explains why slips like that happen and how to keep them in proper perspective. So if you spot a slip like that on this blog, please do point it out in a comment or an e-mail, and I’ll fix it with gratitude and without taking offense.