the (new) legal writer

150 resources

Our tag line here is “A collection of resources for lawyers and other writers.” With that in mind, here is the Online Education Database’s collection of 150 resources to help you write better, faster, and more persuasively. Categories include almanacs, business and legal matters, citation styles, dictionaries, English-language skills, rhetoric, writing skills, and writing software.

Hat tip to Anastasia.

Visuwords

If you’re looking for an ice-cool on-line dictionary and thesaurus, give the Visuwords on-line graphic dictionary a spin. Among other things, it produces “diagrams reminiscent of a neural net” to show associations between words. When you hover your pointer over a word, it displays the word’s definition. Whether or not you find it useful, you’ll have fun playing with it. (Hat tip to Ken Davis.)

As with any thesaurus, please use it judiciously. No elegant variation, please.

A lesson from baseball

I feel bad when I lose an appeal. If you feel the same way, consider this reflection by Stephen Seckler, posted at Counsel to Counsel, about lessons learned from baseball:

Baseball teaches us that losing is the norm. A batter who gets a hit one out of every three times he is up at the plate is considered a superstar. A team that wins ten games in a row is on fire. Winners are not individuals who “win” all the time. Winners are individuals who know how to get past failure.

Abbr.

Novalawcity has a collection of web-sites with exhaustive lists of legal abbreviations. (Hat tip to Jim Calloway.)

Civil Law Dictionary wiki

Vicenç Feliú; Foreign, Comparative and International Law Librarian at the LSU Law Center, is overseeing a Civil Law Dictionary wiki. Civil law is the legal system observed in Louisiana, continental Europe, and many other jurisdictions. Common law, on the other hand, is the legal system observed in England and the United States (excluding Louisiana). If the Civil Law Dictionary wiki is successful, it will help folks who need to translate civil-law terms into common law, and vice-versa.

If you’d like to join the community of editors for the Civil Law Dictionary wiki, follow these instructions.

(Hat tip to beSpacific.)

Garbl's Writing Center

Garbl's Writing Center is an impressive collection of on-line resources for writers. Besides collecting links to resources all over the Web, it contains its own style manual and concise-writing guide. It's maintained by Gary B. Larson, who says that GWC "reflects my commitment to my growth, to clear, concise, and useful writing and to helping others improve their writing. I believe the Internet, used responsibly, has the power and potential to enhance our communication and citizen action."

Warning: GWC includes some political messages, especially on the home page, with which you may agree or disagree. Gary is an unapologetic lefty, and uses GWC to advertise his views in strong language. He says, "I support liberal, progressive candidates, campaigns and causes: peace and disarmament, environmental protection, public education, public transportation, economic opportunity, and civil, equal and human rights." He's not a fan of the current administration.

Urban Dictionary

Here's a resource to help you translate current slang into standard English. The Urban Dictionary bills itself as "a living catalog of human interaction and popular culture created by hundreds of thousands of people, and read by millions." Like Wikipedia, it's written and edited by its readers. It offers Urban Word of the Day, which you can receive by e-mail or RSS feed.

(Hat tip to Triangle Grammar Guide.)

New on the (new) legal writer

I like the Free Dictionary so much that I've added a Free Dictionary search box to the sidebar at right. Give it a test drive and let me know how you like it.

The Free Dictionary

Roy Jacobsen calls The Free Dictionary "[a]n all-in-one reference library and search engine." Roy's recommendation is good enough for me. Go there and you'll find an English dictionary; specialized dictionaries for computing, medicine, law, and finance; two encyclopedias (Columbia and Wikipedia); and many other interesting things. I'm thinking about making it the home page of my browser.

Quotations

A great way to appear well read without actually being well read is to dress up your writing with quotations. Here are a couple of places where you can find them.

My favorite source for quotations is The Quotations Page. Quotations are classified by author (from Aeschylus to Frank Zappa) and by subject. Want to find a quotation about computers? TQP has 27 of them. (If you've ever wondered where I find those space-filling quotations sprinkled throughout Certworthy, now you know.) Don't miss the weblog, which dates back to [drumroll] 1997!

If you can't find it on TQP, then you may be able to find it on Bartleby.com's quotation collection. Here you'll find Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (11,000 entries), the Columbia World of Quotations (65,000 entries), and two other collections.