Today’s writing tip, spotted by Evan Schaeffer, comes from a letter by Raymond Carver to his daughter:
What’s the secret to making your writing flow? Actually it’s no secret at all. Taylor explains at Men With Pens. (Hat tip to the [non]billable hour.)
A few years ago on my other blog, I advised legal researchers to own their downloaded legal authorities. For those who missed that post, here’s the skinny version.
First, when you download cases from Lexis, Westlaw, Fastcase, or whatever, download in a word-processing format (Word or WordPerfect), not PDF. This will enable you to edit them before printing or saving them, which in turn will enable you to do the following things:
One thing should go without saying: Do not change the substance of the opinion itself. Instead, highlight the important parts, as you would with a hard copy. Whatever part of the case you intend to use, you must see it in its full context.
While researching jury instructions today, I came across this passage:
Source: Trapani v. State Farm Fire & Cas. Co., 424 So. 2d 449, 451–52 (La. App. 5 Cir. 1982).
If you’re telling a story involving many players, how do you help the reader keep the players straight? You might do what Judge John R. Brown did in Grigsby v. Coastal Marine Service of Texas, Inc., 412 F.2d 1011 (5th Cir. 1969) (copy in Word format here). In a case involving 17 characters, he listed the entire cast in footnote 3, providing each player’s full name and shorthand name used in the opinion. For individuals, he also listed each one’s employer. This technique yielded two benefits. First, it spared readers the dreaded parenthetical accompanying each character’s introduction (e.g. “... Coastal Marine Service of Texas, Inc. (“Coastal”)”). Second, it gave readers one sure and easily accessible place to find who’s who.
Today’s West Headnote of the Day carries a useful lesson:
Conduct of Department of Justice attorney in scribbling in the margin of district judge’s opinion, submitted as appendix to Department’s brief, the word “WRONG” beside several findings of district judge was “indecorous and unprofessional conduct.” Allen v. Seidman, 881 F.2d 375 (1989).
My guess is that the attorney never intended for anyone outside the office to see those marginal notes. He or she probably wrote them while reviewing the district judge’s opinion, then put the opinion in the file. Later, someone copied the opinion—with marginal notes—for inclusion in the appendix, and no one ever eyeballed the appendix to catch embarrassments like this.
The lesson: Before selecting file materials to be copied for an appendix, inspect them to look for marginal notes, underlining, doodles, etc. If you find any, erase them or cover them up with white tape before photocopying.
A couple of weeks ago, a headline in a law-oriented magazine prompted me to write on the importance of hyphenating phrasal adjectives. Today a different headline teaches the same lesson more vividly, and this time, the headline writer gets it right. From the Onion:
Without the hyphens, diseased and deformed would describe the author. But the hyphens make clear that those words modify animal.
A magazine I’m looking at now has a story with this headline:
401(k) Excessive Fee Litigation
This leaves me to wonder what is excessive: the fee or the litigation? The story reveals that it’s about litigation over excessive fees. A little punctuation removes the ambiguity:
401(k) Excessive-Fee Litigation
“When a phrase functions as an adjective—an increasingly frequent phenomenon in late-20th-century English—the phrase should ordinarily be hyphenated. Seemingly everyone in the literary world knows this except lawyers.” Bryan A. Garner, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage 657 (2d ed. 1995).
Here are some tips for more lively briefs, courtesy of Jim McElhaney. The advice is sound, though I’d treat his rules as general rather than absolute.