A recent addition to the legal-writing blogroll is the SPOGG blog. SPOGG stands for the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, which promotes National Grammar Day and urges you to “grab a red pen and join the party.” I guess they’ll party like it’s as if it were 1999. (Hat tip to John McIntyre.)
I’ve added an appellate blogroll to this blog’s sidebar, for two reasons. First, many appellate blogs have blogrolled The (New) Legal Writer, so I wanted a means of returning the favor. Second, many readers of this blog are appellate lawyers, and I thought they would appreciate this feature.
Charles Halton (the biblical scholar, not the actor) has compiled a list of top 10 impediments to beautiful academic writing. Many items on the list apply to legal writing, such as:
1. Quoting a foreign language and not providing a translation.
2. Jargon.
3. Endless, rambling writing.
4. Being boring.
5. Not using section headings.
(And my favorite) 10. Don’t try to improve your writing.
Charles elaborates on each of these, and on the other four listed items. To get the whole thing, read his post.
Though Charles’s main topic is biblical and Near-Eastern studies, he writes regularly about engaging academic writing. Since writing is writing, many of these posts apply to legal writing too.
I’ll let Alan Freedman, author of Party of the First Part, introduce his blog:
If you are reading this page...
Then you are passionately devoted to language, or law, or the language of the law. Or you just want to appear smarter by quoting me at dinner parties. This is the blog of Adam Freedman, columnist for New York Law Journal Magazine (“Legal Lingo”). Here I’ll post my columns, observations on legalese, and the latest news from the frontlines in the eternal battle between the forces of Plain English vs. Precision.
Alan posts sporadically, so you may want to subscribe to his RSS feed rather than check in on him daily. But sporadic or not, he’s worth reading.
Usually when I plug Blawg Review, I plug it on Minor Wisdom. But this week’s Blawg Review is on Susan McDonald’s Legal Research & Writing blog. And since readers of this blog will undoubtedly enjoy Susan’s blog, I thought I’d put the plug here. So check out Blawg Review on Legal Research & Writing, and bookmark LR&W for future reference.
If you like your writing tips delivered by audio, then check out Grammar Girl's Quick & Dirty Tips for Better Writing. Each post on Grammar Girl's weblog comes in two forms: written and podcast. To listen to the audio, just click the play button on the Pickle Player, or click where it says “Download the audio file.”
Mr. Thorne, a professional editor, offers advice on law-firm publishing on his new blog, Set in Style. By "law-firm publishing," he means any legal writing read by anyone outside the law firm:
This blog is meant to be a resource for those involved in law firm publishing — from attorneys writing articles, to copywriters producing practice area brochures, to the publishers of law reviews, to paralegals preparing statements of facts.
Here, you’ll find information about various aspects of law firm publishing — matters of grammar and style, typesetting and page layout, production and more.
Set in Style has an attractive layout and a sidebar full of useful links. If you care about your work product, you'll want to pay a visit. (Now if I can get Mr. Thorne to help me type real quotation marks and apostrophes instead of these tick marks ....)
Animus Revertendi, a blog by Chinese students in American law schools, has an interesting commentary on American legal writing. To put it briefly: legal writing is unnecessarily dull because, beginning in law school and continuing on into our legal careers, creativity is beaten out of us:
... The best-regarded law student writings are often throughly researched and clearly presented, but without any originality in style or organization. In fact, if a student tries to write with a sense of humor or an unusual touch of personality, he could be punished in terms of grades. Thus, the incentive is to produce pieces of writing that are standardized and flavorless. Sure, the result may be an end product with "balanced-nutrition." But who really wants to consume, or tends to remember, something that tastes like wax?
... In recent years, since many more clerks with similar background (top grades, law review, top schools) are drafting opinions, they tend to gravitate towards what served them well in law school — too many citations and too little personality.
Writing with style is difficult; learning to do it is a lifelong job, and sometimes the effort isn't appreciated. Conformity, on the other hand, is relatively easy. That, I think, is why too much legal writing is needlessly dull.
Some blogs promote proper usage generally. I suppose there may be a few blogs focused on proper punctuation. Here's one with an even narrower focus: Apostrophe Catastrophe, dedicated to promoting proper use of the apostrophe and exposing its misuses (hence the "Catastrophe" part). (Hat tip to Celia Elwell.)
Every craftsman needs proper tools. If your craft is writing, then Roy Peter Clark's Writing Tools belongs in your toolbox. This is so whether you're a blogger, a briefwriter, a newspaper reporter or columnist, or even an aspiring or accomplished novelist.
Unlike many other books about writing, this one contains tools, not rules. As Clark says in the introduction, the tools "work outside the territory of right and wrong, and inside the land of cause and effect." The 50 tools are divided into four categories:
You can find a quick list of the tools by clicking here. For elaboration on each, buy the book. And read Writing Tools: The Blog, where, three times a week, Clark offers a new tool or an example of or variation on one of the original 50.
