the (new) legal writer

Two Bryan Garner seminars in one day

Bryan Garner is hitting the road, giving two seminars at each stop: a 3½-hour version of Advanced Legal Writing and Editing in the morning, and a 3-hour presentation of Making Your Case, based on the book he wrote with Justice Antonin Scalia. You can register for one or the other, or for both. Here’s the schedule:

• Sept. 13 — New York, NY
• Sept. 27 — Atlanta, GA
• Sept. 28 — Jackson, MS
• Oct. 7 — San Diego, CA
• Oct. 8 — Los Angeles, CA
• Oct. 11 — Phoenix, AZ
• Oct. 13 — Portland, OR
• Oct. 14 — Seattle, WA
• Nov. 4 — San Francisco, CA
• Nov. 5 — Sacramento, CA
• Nov. 8 — Washington, DC
• Nov. 16 — New Orleans, LA

Writing well: Immunity from obsolescence?

Over at Writing, Clear and Simple, Roy Jacobsen makes the case that a good writer will always be able to find a job, no matter what technological changes occur. For what it’s worth, I’ll say that working hard at writing has kept me employed in the legal profession for 20 years and counting.

Writers on Process

If you’re interested in how creative writers do their thing, then you should check out Ben Opipari’s new blog, Writers on Process. There, Ben posts the things he learns from interviewing writers in all sorts of genres. If you dream of a second career as a poet, a song writer, or a novelist, visit Ben’s blog, where you can read how people already doing those things do what they do.

Your computer is not an Underwood typewriter. So stop putting two spaces after every sentence.

Sometimes I’m surprised at how tightly some otherwise clear-thinking people cling to what they learned in high-school typing class. When I took typing in high school, 37 years ago, I was taught to hit the space bar twice after each sentence. That was a good lesson back then, because I was typing on an Underwood manual typewriter, a machine incapable of producing anything in a proportionately spaced font.

Today, if you’re reading this blog post, then you probably write on a computer, not an Underwood typewriter. And unless you’re perverse enough to have set the default font in your word-processing software to Courier, everything you write on your computer is written in a proportionately spaced font. This fact makes the two-spaces rule obsolete. Once space after each sentence is enough.

Recently John McIntyre wrote about this; the flak he caught prompted him to write two follow-up posts (here and here). Me, I’m left wondering why anyone who cares deeply about getting their writing right would be so unwilling to re-examine what they learned in high school.

My prior blog posts on this should-be-uncontroversial topic are here, here, here, and here.

(Photo credit.)

A deceptively ambiguous adverb

I didn’t realize that deceptively is ambiguous until I read this post on The Grammarphobia Blog.