Do your own writing

Five months ago, I gave seven reasons why lawyers should burn their form files. An eighth reason is suggested in George Orwell's essay, Politics and the English Language: Writing from forms encourages the writer to switch off the brain. If, on the other hand, you write for yourself, then you must engage your brain. This requires time and effort, but the results will be a better work product — and a better writer.

Let me say what I mean by writing from forms. Many lawyers collect exemplars of the things they write, to use as guides for the next time they have to write something similar. An exemplar saved by a lawyer for future use is a form. A collection of such exemplars is a form file.

Let me also say that my opinions about form files apply only to litigation practice. I don't know anything about estate planning, or mergers and acquisitions, or incorporating a business.

For litigators, forms can serve some useful purposes. They can preserve your good ideas and help you remember them the next time a similar task arises. They can also save time by serving as formatting templates.

The problem is over-reliance on forms. Some people, faced with the task of writing something, will search their form file for the closest match, change the caption, do a little bit of tweaking, and sign. Others will lift phrases, sentences, and even entire paragraphs from the form and transplant them into whatever they're writing, without thinking about whether the transplants are necessary. The idea seems to be, "It's in the form; therefore it must be necessary; therefore I'd better use it too." In short: copy unless there's a reason not to copy, and when in doubt, copy. Orwell might describe this sort of non-writing the way he described bad writing generally: "It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug."

Habitually "writing" like this results in the bad things I talked about five months ago, i.e., bad things that happen to the writing. Orwell's essay suggests that this sort of "writing" (really an evasion of writing) also does bad things to the writer. By letting someone else do your writing for you, you also let someone else do your thinking for you:

You can shirk [the effort of writing] by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.

You become mentally lazy. Eventually, parts of your mind wither from disuse. Each use of a ready-made phrase, Orwell believed, "anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain." If that's true, then imagine the effect of ready-made sentences and paragraphs and even entire documents, resorted to every day in lieu of actual writing.

In response to my entry five months ago, one commenter suggested that clients don't want their lawyers to be inefficient. I'll grant that. But I also believe that my clients wants me to be a lawyer, not a merchant of verbiage. I also believe that we lawyers went to law school to learn how to think, not to learn how to copy.

Comments

I want the Bruderhof Daily Dig back. I would subscribe to it.
What a loss.