the (new) legal writer

Hopefully, we can lose our aversion to sentence adverbs.

Sorry, snoots, but “hopefully” as a sentence adverb is okay in all but the most formal contexts. So says the OED.

One way to make the client happy

One way to make your client happy is to make his or her job easier. One way to make the client’s job easier is to submit drafts less in need of editing. How do you do that? Mark Herrmann explains.

Do me a favor; like Scribes.

If you’re on Facebook, please visit Scribes: The American Society of Legal Writers. If you like what you see, click the “like” button.

I have administrator privileges there, and lately I’ve been working to make the Scribes timeline more interesting, posting links to stuff that’s interesting, informative, or just fun—at least for the kind of people who read this blog. So check it out. Thanks.

More on hyphens and en-dashes and em-dashes

If you write, you need to know the difference between hyphens, en-dashes, and em-dashes. If you do your writing on a computer keyboard, you should know how to type each of these punctuation marks. To gain that knowledge, read this post by Lynn Gaertner-Johnston (note the hyphen) at Business Writing.

When disagreement on style gets out of hand, ...

... stuff like this happens. How many copy editors must die before this violence ends?