Minor Wisdom

ABA's Ross Essay Contest

If you're a member of the ABA, and if you enjoy writing, then consider entering the Ross Essay Contest. First prize is $5,000. Here's what they're looking for, in 600 words or less:

Each entry must address the following topic: Your life in the law. As a lawyer, you have an important impact on the lives and fortunes of your clients. But the law affects lawyers, too. Tell us about how practicing law has changed you as a person—for better or worse.

The deadline is March 31, 2006. The other criteria and eligibility requirements are here.

I have to admit to being intrigued by the topic. I've never really thought about the effect on me of practicing law — the difference between the person I am and the person I would have been had I never entered law school. Is it possible to know that difference? To know the person who would have been? It's hard enough figuring out the person I actually am.

The perils of cut-and-paste journalism

Alas (a blog) calls this the worst newspaper error ever. See also educe me. (Via Out of the Jungle.)

ABC's of copyright

Here's a tip for all writers, including bloggers:

If you write anything (and I do mean anything) but have never given copyright much thought, do yourself and everyone else a big favor and read Brad Templeton’s articles, A brief intro to copyright, and 10 Big Myths about copyright explained.

Roy Jacobsen, Writing, Clear and Simple (Jan. 3, 2006).

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.

For writers (legal and otherwise), a suggested New Year's resolution

If you resolve to improve your writing in 2006, I have a few books to recommend to help you keep your resolution. All of these books focus on the structure of writing. Read them, and you'll see that good expository writing is a science more than an art: anyone can learn how to do it.

First, read A Grammar Book for You and I ... Oops, Me! by C. Edward Good. Or to save a few bucks, read Who's (Oops) Whose Grammar Book Is This Anyway?, also by Ed Good—same book sold under a different title for a slightly lower price. Either book will teach you to analyze writing grammatically, and to come up with better grammatical structures to express the idea. For example, when you see a dependent clause functioning as the subject of a sentence, you'll remember that nouns work excellently as the subject of a sentence. You'll study the clause and perhaps come up with a noun phrase or a noun that serves the purpose. Good's mantra is to convert clauses into phrases, and phrases into single words. You accomplish the conversion by grammatical analysis.

After you've a Good grammar book, read The Sense of Structure and Expectations, both by George Gopen. Like Good, Gopen analyzes writing structurally. The idea is that readers expect to find certain information in certain specific places. If you deliver the information that readers expect, where they expect it, you bridge the gap between writer and reader, and greatly increase the chances that the reader will get the message you're trying to deliver. Sense of Structure is written for all expository writers, while Expectations is written for writing teachers. But don't skip Expectations just because you don't hold classes in writing. If you care about writing, you've probably been teaching yourself how to improve—in which case the self-teacher in you will benefit from Expectations.

These books have in common a valuable quality: by focusing on the structure, they show you how written English works. If you know how language or any other tool works, you can use it more effectively.

Why we write

I just finished reading a little book of essays by George Orwell, including Why I Write (also the title of the little book). Orwell says that "there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one write the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living." It struck me that Orwell's four motives motivate me to write this blog. If you write a blog or anything else, or think you'd like to, look in the mirror to see how much of these four things you find:

1. "Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend that this is not a motive, and a strong one." I have to confess to this one. I'll wager that egoism motivates most bloggers.
2. "Aesthetic enthusiam. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement.... The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or a writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc." If you've ever rewritten something to get the words just right, or if you've ever reformatted your blog to improve its appearance, then you were probably exhibiting this motive. Once after I reformatted this blog, someone commented that "tinkering with the layout is half the fun." Yep.
3. "Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity." Maybe this motive explains why we call it a blog: short for web log.
4. "Political purpose — using the word 'political' in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society that they should strive after." I see this motive behind many blogs listed in the column at right, e.g. Coalition for Darfur, Arbitrary & Capricious, Clusterfuck Nation, Crime & Federalism, and many others. I'd even say that Ernie the Attorney is political in the broad sense; he doesn't push a party or a candidate, but he does envision how things might be and presents that vision to readers.

Be yourself

Here is a lesson for singers, applied by Tom Peters to giving speeches and presentations, re-applied by Roy Jacobsen to writing generally, and now re-applied by me to legal writing, especially persuasive writing:

"Put your life into what you do." "Your own humanity is your pathway to artistry." Beware "stilted speech." Students "hide inside technique." Conclusion: "The lesson Ms Cook came to teach was that artists achieve their peak when they learn to stop proving themselves and simply, to borrow the Shakespearean phrase, let it be. It’s their humanity we respond to in the end, their ability to strip away the self-consciousness that locks us inside ourselves, and reveal the stuff that really boils in our souls."

This is one reason why I discourage lawyers from over-reliance on forms when trying to write persuasively: because a form written by someone else cannot possibly convey your humanity.

Traumaticalized

Chris Rose has been writing some great stuff lately. Now he's outdone himself. The other day he gave Dr. John a tour of the damage in the 9th Ward. His account, published in today's Times-Picayune, confirms my belief that he rates a Pulitzer.

Writing, Clear and Simple

If you write anything—I mean anything—then you should bookmark, blogroll, or subscribe to the RSS feed of Writing, Clear and Simple, by Roy Jacobsen. (Hat tip to Wayne Schiess for this one.)

A brilliant oxymoron

Today I spotted a brilliant oxymoron.¹ First, let's clear up what an oxymoron is. Several months ago, a thoughtful reader corrected my misuse of the term oxymoron. I had used the word to describe an inadvertent contradiction in terms. But according to Wikipedia:

An oxymoron (plural "oxymora") (noun) is a figure of speech that combines two normally contradictory terms (e.g. "anarchy rules"). Oxymoron is a Greek term derived from the adjectives oxys ("sharp, keen") and moros ("blunt, dull"). Oxymora are a proper subset of the expressions called contradiction in terms. What distinguishes oxymora from other paradoxes and contradictions is that they are used intentionally, for rhetorical effect, and the contradiction is only apparent, as the combination of terms provides a novel expression of some concept.

The most common form of oxymoron involves an adjective–noun combination. For example, the following line from Tennyson's Idylls of the King contains two oxymora:

"And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true"

Now that we all know what an oxymoron is, check out Jim Kuntsler's brilliant use of one in today's installment of Clusterfuck Nation. In the process of faulting the New York Times, Jim writes:

The Times brings its usual magisterial lack of critical thinking to the subject.

I love that! The OED definition of magisterial is "[o]f, relating to, designating, or befitting a master, teacher, or other person qualified to speak with authority; masterly, authoritative, commanding." The contradiction between magisterial and lack of critical thinking is an oxymoron. Also, magisterial sounds like majesty, and the idea of a majestic lack of critical thinking makes me laugh. So Jim's oxymoron works on two levels.

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¹ And no, "brilliant oxymoron" is not an oxymoron.