the (new) legal writer

Drunk and Tight

I often blog with a tumbler of Dewar’s nearby. So I should pay particular attention to John McIntyre’s A Sot’s Guide to the Elements of Style.

Farewell to Robust Writing

After a 16-month run, Jesse Hines is retiring his excellent blog, Robust Writing. Jesse, congratulations on an excellent run, and thanks for the free help you’ve given the rest of  us.

Literary Legs

There’s a new item on my legal-writing blogroll: Literary Legs, by Ben Opipari. The tagline is “The intersection of running and writing.” What does running have to do with writing? Ben explains that “both require the same elements: patience, good form, discipline, cadence, rhythm, and variety.” In fact, running can improve your writing, or at least Ben thinks so. And judging from some of his articles that I’ve read, I’d say Ben is worth listening to.

First Arrow

Roy Jacobsen was kind enough to tag me with the Premio Dardo Award, which “acknowledges the effort of a particular blogger to transmit cultural, ethical, literary and personal values in his or her writing.” The rules require me to pass the award on to 15 other bloggers. I’m usually not one for chain blog posts, but I’m happy to oblige here. Besides being good writers, many bloggers I’ve come to know are also good people. And for a while now, I’ve wanted to write a post or two about some of them. The following blogs are just a few that fit the criteria for the Premio Dardo Award:

• Adams Drafting. I’ve never met Ken Adams, but I’ve come to know him through e-mail and blog posts. He is the pre-eminent expert on contract drafting. In his writing, he reveals himself as a meticulous person.

• Bad Language. Matthew Stibbe is an Englishman and a freelance writer who evidently enjoys his work. He’s figured out how to blog for fun and profit.

• Business Writing. Lynn Gaertner-Johnston teaches lawyers and others how to handle the kinds of writing we do most often: e-mail, letters, interoffice memos. She urges us to write like human beings, and she leads by example.

• Fairyland Castle. Martin Magnusson is an attorney interested in language. He started blogging last October, and is off to a fine start.

• Manage Your Writing. Each Monday, Ken Davis gives us one tip to work on during the week to improve our writing. He comes across as a kind, gentle teacher, more interested in encouraging good habits than red-inking bad ones.

• Party of the First Part, subtitled Adventures in Legalese, is Adam Freedman’s playground. Check out his Hall of Shame, where he skewers bad writing and translates it into something a human being might understand.

• Writing Tools. Roy Peter Clark doesn’t need a plug from the likes of me. He is a successful journalist and author who shares what he knows about making your writing matter. (If you don’t have his book Writing Tools, get it.)

• You Don’t Say! John McIntyre is a copy editor for the Baltimore Sun. He describes himself as a “veteran drudge” who “writes about language, usage, journalism, and arbitrarily chosen subjects.” Lately he’s taken to posting videos of himself telling enjoyably corny jokes. 

My remaining seven awards will be bestowed on my other blog, Minor Wisdom.

Top 30 blogs on writing

Molly DiBianca has collected her list of 30 best blogs on writing. She was kind enough to include this one, for which I’m grateful. But please peruse her list and check out the other 29.

Legal-writing blogs and resources

The good folks at Legal Writing Prof Blog have collected a list of their favorite blogs. And one of the contributors to LWPB, Coleen Barger, has her own list of legal-writing blogs and web sites at Barger on Legal Writing, which itself is a fine resource.

SPOGG

A recent addition to the legal-writing blogroll is the SPOGG blog. SPOGG stands for the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, which promotes National Grammar Day and urges you to “grab a red pen and join the party.” I guess they’ll party like it’s as if it were 1999. (Hat tip to John McIntyre.)

A new sidebar feature

I’ve added an appellate blogroll to this blog’s sidebar, for two reasons. First, many appellate blogs have blogrolled The (New) Legal Writer, so I wanted a means of returning the favor. Second, many readers of this blog are appellate lawyers, and I thought they would appreciate this feature.

Top 10 impediments to beautiful writing

Charles Halton (the biblical scholar, not the actor) has compiled a list of top 10 impediments to beautiful academic writing. Many items on the list apply to legal writing, such as:

1. Quoting a foreign language and not providing a translation.

2. Jargon.

3. Endless, rambling writing.

4. Being boring.

5. Not using section headings.

(And my favorite) 10. Don’t try to improve your writing.

Charles elaborates on each of these, and on the other four listed items. To get the whole thing, read his post.

Though Charles’s main topic is biblical and Near-Eastern studies, he writes regularly about engaging academic writing. Since writing is writing, many of these posts apply to legal writing too.

Party of the First Part

I’ll let Alan Freedman, author of Party of the First Part, introduce his blog:

If you are reading this page...

Then you are passionately devoted to language, or law, or the language of the law. Or you just want to appear smarter by quoting me at dinner parties. This is the blog of Adam Freedman, columnist for New York Law Journal Magazine (“Legal Lingo”). Here I’ll post my columns, observations on legalese, and the latest news from the frontlines in the eternal battle between the forces of Plain English vs. Precision.

Alan posts sporadically, so you may want to subscribe to his RSS feed rather than check in on him daily. But sporadic or not, he’s worth reading.