Improve Your Legal Writing

Wherever you are in your legal career, you can always improve your writing. But how can you find the time? Wayne Schiess has some suggestions for improving your writing, at his blog, Legalwriting.net. Prof. Schiess wrote the suggestions for busy lawyers, and you can use them too.

I have a couple of suggestions to add to those offered by Prof. Schiess. First, read blogs about writing. Besides Legalwriting.net, I recommend the (new) legal writer, Manage Your Writing, and the Illinois Trial Practice Weblog. Manage Your Writing is about business writing, but the principles apply just as well to legal writing. Evan Schaeffer writes on a number of practical topics, including legal writing, on his Illinois Trial Practice Weblog. Reading blogs about writing will take only a few minutes a day, and you will gain many helpful tips.

My second suggestion, if you are a law student, is to use Prof. Schiess's CALI lessons, Punctuation and Grammar Basics for Law Students and Punctuation and Grammar: Advanced. Your use of punctuation and grammar says a lot about you, especially if you use them poorly.

You cannot afford to submit a poorly-written document to a court, another attorney, a client, or a potential client. Do something to improve your writing now.

Grammar Girl to the Rescue

If you would like to improve your writing, but you can't bear the thought of learning all those rules of grammar, Grammar Girl can help. Grammar Girl is really Mignon Fogarty, a professional writer whose podcasts help make learning about grammar fun.

The podcast's home is Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing, where you can download or listen to the Grammar Girl podcast episodes, read a transcript of an episode, and subscribe to the podcast. You can also record a question for Grammar Girl.

Grammar Girl has an audio book, Quick and Dirty Tips to Clean Up Your Writing, coming out on CD next month. You can download the book now at iTunes or audible.com.

QDnow also has other Quick and Dirty Tips for Doing Things Better, including Mr. Manners' Quick and Dirty Tips for a More Polite Life, Legal Lad's Quick and Dirty Tips for a More Lawful Life, and Money Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for a Richer Life.

Thanks to Prof. Schmitz for the tip.

The Importance of Proofreading---and Some Tips

The other night I heard a student telling another how she had avoided a proofreading calamity. During class that night, each student had to get up and argue in support of a motion they had previously turned in. The student realized that she had inadvertently left out the word "not," so she covered her error by arguing the other side of the case. Of course, in the real world, you can't just switch sides.

The student's story reminded me of an unemployment case I attended years ago. The woman seeking unemployment benefits was a law student who had been fired for incompetence by her law-firm employer. Although several errors were given as grounds for her firing, the beginning of the firm's lack of confidence in her abilities stemmed from a near-perfect memo she had prepared. Howevere, she had left out the word "not" in the subject line of the memo. Although the remainder of the memo correctly stated the law, the most prominent sentence was wrong because of one little word.

The difficulty of proofreading is that when you try to proofread something on which you have been working for a long time, you sometimes see what you meant to write, instead of what you did write, so you can miss important errors. I try to avoid this problem by not working on the project for a day or two before my final proofreading. Some people proofread in a different font or font size than they have used while writing. Others find that printing the document forproofreading, instead of reading it on the screen, does the trick.

Eric Waltmire recently posted his tip for How to Proofread Perfectly. Eric recommends having your computer read the document to you while you read along. See Eric Waltmire's Blog for details. (Eric is an SIU Law alum.)

Appellate Practice Tip of the Week: "Clearly"

The North Dakota Supreme Court posts an "Appellate Practice Tip of the Week" on its website, along with other helpful information for attorneys and members of the public. This week's Appellate Practice Tip is:

The word "clearly" is no substitute for authority or logic.

There are also tips specific to the record, stays, briefs, the appendix, mootness, oral argument, petitions for rehearing, and the Administrative Agencies Practice Act. Some other Appellate Practice Tips to consider as you finalize your brief:

• Never use many words when a few will do. A longer brief is not necessarily a better brief.
• Make sure cases and statutes are cited correctly. Make sure cases cited are still good law.
• At the end of your brief, state clearly and concisely what specific action you are seeking from the appellate court.
• "Always use your computer's spell check, and never trust it." —Steve Wilbers, Minneapolis Star Tribune
• Proofread. Then proofread again.