Entries from August 2009 ↓

If brevity is the soul of wit, Twitter is the soul of brevity. As you should all know by now, Twitter is a web service that allows users to post brief messages, called tweets. “Brief” may actually be insufficient to describe a tweet – miniscule is more like it. Each tweet is limited to 140 characters.

Not 140 words, 140 characters.

I use twitter for all sorts of reasons – to share news stories that interest me, to promote my practice, to comment on current events, to crack jokes, to network, and, yes, sometimes to tell you all what I am eating. Twittter’s 140 character limit has forced me to convey some complex thoughts in very few words. That has made me a generally better writer.

It reminds me of the scene from A River Runs Through It where young Norman Maclean is taught composition by his father, a Scots Presbyterian minister (I looked for a video – nada). Three times Norman turned his work over to his father, marvelously portrayed by Tom Skerrit. Three times a red pen would cross out unnecessary words, and his father would hand it back to Norman saying “again, half as long.” Only on his fourth attempt does the essay pass muster, a fraction of its original length.

I tweet using a similar process. I begin by writing the full sentence, complete with my tendency to overpuncuate and pad the sentence with modifiers. If the sentence is longer than 140 characters, I remove unnecessary modifiers and excessive commas. A ten letter word might be replaced by a six letter synonym. With some effort 140 meaningful characters emerge, and it is usually better than the original.

Obviously, a brief is much longer than a tweet, but if you treat each sentence as a tweet, your writing will be stronger and sharper. I have yet to meet a writer, legal or otherwise, whose first drafts do not contain needless adjectives or unecessarily long words. Remember the advice of a Scots Prebyterian minister, “Again, half as long.”

In my previous entry on this subject, I wrote about how the best legal writing reads like a well crafted essay.  In this entry, I’ll tackle the second myth behind the rubbish that legal writing is somehow different.

• It’s written in legalese.

Just like the previous entry on the topic, there is a kernel of truth behind it.  Historically, legal writing contained countless terms of art like “party of the second part” and “the demised premises.”  This kind of language conveyed a certain aura on the lawyer, because these terms are confusing to non-lawyers (the demised premises?  The house is dead?).  In effect, using legalese made us special in the eyes of the clients, as if we have some special source that we can tap into to magically save the client’s tucchus.

This kind of writing, however, is just as confusing to lawyers as it is to the public at large.  Most importantly, legal writing that throws legalese around willy nilly is also confusing to judges.  Plain and simple legal writing, without the overuse of legalese, is most effective.  I say “overuse” because in some cases the particular term is going to either so embedded in our culture that it transcends legalese, like “cease and desist.”

More troublesome than specific legal terms of art, however, are those phrases lawyers use in their writing that do little more than pad out the word count.  Think of phrases such as “owing to the fact that” or “in light of the fact that” and you will get a sense of what I mean.  In most instances, both phrases could be replaced with a very simple “because.”  Far less intimidating to the reader, far simpler to understand, and ultimately far more persuasive.  Prof. Eugene Volokh, who has had a good year, year and a half (if getting cited by the Supreme Court three times in the most important constitutional case of the last twenty years is a good thing), has put together an excellent list of phrases to avoid, along with suitable replacements.  In every instance, the suggested replacement is clearer, simpler, and shorter than the legalese version.

Legal writing is meant to be understood, and where people’s rights are at stake clarity is even more important.  Legalese hides meaning, so avoid it, and your writing will be much, much stronger.