If you have a case poised for a shot at the U.S. Supreme Court, then you’ll want to read Tips on Petitioning for and Opposing Certiorari in the U.S. Supreme Court, by Mayer Brown appellate lawyers Timothy Bishop, Jeffrey Sarles, and Stephen Kane. While you’re at it, you might peruse some of the MB appellate group’s other articles on Supreme Court practice or appellate practice.
Every good writer needs a good editor. We know that’s true for all writers—except for the one we see in the mirror. If that sounds like you, and if you’d like your writing to be better than just okay, then read Douglas Abrams’s article, We Are the Product of Editing, available on SSRN and in Precedent, the Missouri Bar’s quarterly magazine.
If you write for publication (law reviews, bar journals, magazines), then you’ll benefit from Framing Academic Articles, by Gregory G. Colomb and the late Joseph M. Williams. It describes how to write an introduction that grabs readers’ attention—how to make readers care about your arcane legal topic.
The article appears in the latest issue of Perspectives, a free newsletter published by West for teachers of legal research and writing. Although most of the articles are geared toward teachers, each issue also carries one article on writing tips, which practitioners who care about improving their own writing will find useful. To subscribe to the hard copy, click here.
Here are some tips for more lively briefs, courtesy of Jim McElhaney. The advice is sound, though I’d treat his rules as general rather than absolute.
The Legal Writing Institute has uploaded volume 14 of its journal, featuring a symposium on storytelling. I haven’t had a chance to read any of the articles yet, but many of them look intriguing. (Hat tip to Legal Writing Prof Blog.)
If you’re a summer associate, then Ross Guberman has a 12-step program for you to improve your writing and impress the firm. (Hat tip to Ross-Blakley Law Library Blog.)
In The Art of Written Persuasion: The Rise of Written Persuasion, Troy Simpson traces the rise of written advocacy in England and Wales, Australia, and America. This article is the first of a series. In future installments, Simpson will examine why, despite the rise of written advocacy, lawyers’ written-advocacy skills remain under-developed and will suggest some possible solutions. (Hat tip to beSpacific.)
Like rappers and shock-jocks, lawyers are guilty of cheapening language, and in the process we have made our profession less civil. So says Kenneth P. Nolan in this article from the Summer 2007 issue of Litigation. Take a few minutes to read it. And try to remember that invective is rarely persuasive.
To emphasize something in writing, many lawyers resort to typographical gimmicks: italics, bold, underlining, all capital letters, or some combination of these. To de-emphasize something, many lawyers either bury it in a footnote or, worse, omit it completely, hoping that if ignored, the thing will just go away.
There is a better way. Actually there are many better ways. In To Go Boldly Without Bold, Dr. Benjamin R. Opipari describes several more sophisticated ways to emphasize or de-emphasize things. His lessons are similar to those taught by Dr. George D. Gopen; they involve understanding the reader’s expectations about the structure of sentences and paragraphs, and using various techniques to either meet those expecations or (every now and then) to upset them.
One thing I learned from Dr. Opipari’s article is not to overuse the em-dash. He recommends using the em-dash sparingly, “to destroy the natural direction of the sentence, to forcefully move it in another direction so that what comes after is a sudden shift in meaning and a surprise to the reader. In other words, the dash should break the readers’ expectations of what they thought was coming. Dashes at the end of a clause should reveal something surprising, ironic, or shocking.” He suggests that “[t]he writer who uses five or six dashes on a page for any reason forfeits any expectation of surprise.”
I’m not sure that em-dashes should be restricted to the degree that Dr. Opipari suggests. Bryan Garner, for one, calls the em-dash “the second most underused mark of punctuation” in legal writing, and recommends using it to “clarify a sentence that is clogged up with commas.”1 Still, I must acknowledge my own overuse of the em-dash to create emphasis, probably because it’s too easy: much easier than restructuring a sentence or a paragraph. So my personal short-term resolution is not to banish the em-dash, but to use it no more than once per page.
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1 Bryan A. Garner, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage 715 (2d ed. 1995).
John Paschetto, a Delaware lawyer, has written an excellent article on proofreading. In it, he explains the difference between editing and proofreading, advocates proofreading in stages, and offers valuable tips to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your proofreading. (Hat tip to Legal Writing Prof Blog.)
