CBA Record Sept. 2016

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Choose Your Words with Care
Choose your words with care–pick con-
crete words, familiar words, and do not
use lawyerisms. Concrete words “grip
and move your reader’s mind.” Abstract
words tend to be vague. Lawyers may
want the wiggle room of a vague word,
but we should resist for the sake of clarity.
Watch out for attractive but vague words
like “basis, situation, consideration, facet,
character, factor, degree, aspect, and cir-
cumstances.”
Abstract Words Concrete Words
In our present circum-
stances, the budgetary
aspect is a factor which
must be taken into con-
sideration to a greater
degree.
Now we must think
more about money.
Wydick was a great champion of simple,
straightforward language. “Given a choice
between a familiar word and one that will
send your reader groping for the dictionary,
use the familiar word,” wroteWydick. “The
reader’s attention is a precious commodity,
and you cannot afford to waste it by creat-
ing distractions.” Even when using familiar
words, prefer the simple to the complex or
“stuffy.” Use the nickel word instead of the
fifty-cent word.
Complex Simple
Elucidate Explain
Utilize Use
Avoid lawyerisms. One of my profes-
sors in law school said if you learned the
word in law school, don’t use it in your
writing. Although an overstatement–some-
times we need to write “motion for sum-
mary judgment”–the sentiment is sound.
Lawyerisms or legalese “give writing a legal
smell, but they carry little or no legal sub-
stance,” according toWydick. Non-lawyers
may not understand them, and they add
little or no meaning to the sentence.
Lawyerisms to Avoid
Aformentioned
Whereas
Hereinafter
Res gestae
Arrange Your Words with Care
In addition to choosing words that are easy
to understand, a good writer needs to struc-
ture sentences to make it easy on the reader.
In the English language, the easiest word
order to understand is subject, verb, object.
When lawyers separate these key elements,
they “test the agility of their readers by
making them leap wide gaps between the
subject and the verb and between the verb
and the object,” according toWydick. Such
sentences tend to be unclear and hard to
understand. Make it easier on your reader
by keeping the subject, verb, and object
close together.
Gap Gap Closed
This agreement, unless
revocation has occurred
Unless sooner revoked,
this agreement expires
at an earlier date, shall
expire on November 1,
2012
on November 1, 2012
the defendant, in ad-
dition to having to pay
punitive damages, may
be liable for plaintiff’s
costs and attorney fees.
The defendant may
have to pay plaintiff’s
costs and attorney fees
in addition to punitive
damages.
In addition, Wydick advises lawyers to
put modifying words close to what they
modify. In a mind-bending example, put-
ting the word “only” in any of seven places
produces different meanings in the follow-
ing sentence: “She said that he shot her.”
It is generally more clear to put “only”
immediately before the word it modifies.
If that is still unclear, move it to the begin-
ning or end of the sentence.
Ambiguous Clear
Lessee shall use the
vessel only for recrec-
reation.
Lesseemust use the ves-
sel for recreation only.
Shares are sold to the
public only by the parent
corporation.
Only the parent corpora-
tion sells shares to the
public.
Train Yourself to Write Well
How do you learn Wydick’s lessons? Prac-
tice. Wydick included exercises in each
chapter to reinforce his lessons. Sit down
and take some time on a regular basis to
complete Wydick’s exercises. Sometimes it
can be difficult to find errors in our own
writing. If you find that to be the case, edit
someone else’s work. Look for some of the
errors described above and elsewhere in
Wydick’s book.
Your practice will pay off. This year I
had the pleasure of working with a group
of students in an Advanced Legal Writing
course, implementing many of Wydick’s
ideas over 13 weeks. Every week the stu-
dents completed an editing exercise based
on one of Wydick’s lessons. Some of them
said this constant training improved their
writing more than ever before, including
one whose note was selected for publica-
tion by the law review.
We all had a copy of Strunk and White
on our shelf in college. Add Plain English
for Lawyers to the shelf in your law office.
After all, there is a reason it has sold over
1 Million copies.
DEALING WITH
HIGH CONFLICT PERSONALITIES
IN DIVORCE
The Collaborative Law Institute
of Illinois presents:
Attend this interactive workshop
designed to understand and manage
high conflict personalities in divorce.
Led by lawyer, mediator, therapist,
and High Conflict Institute founder
Bill Eddy, this program will offer
insight into the nature of high conflict
people and will provide practical
tools for dealing with them.
Learn more and register:
or call 312-882-8000
IL Attorneys: 6 hours of MCLE credit
has been requested.
Friday, November 18, 2016
Cafe La Cave - Des Plaines, IL
CBA RECORD 53