by Matthew Salzwedel
on May 1, 2013
Last week at Lawyerist I republished my April Minnesota Lawyer column titled Use 5-Cent Words for 10-Dollar Ideas. The column expanded on a previous Lawyerist column I wrote called Simple Legal Writing a Newfangled Idea? Hardly.
Both columns point out that legal writing in plain English isn’t something that Bryan Garner dreamed up in law school and decided to foist on the legal profession. To the contrary, for hundreds of years writers have produced great works by writing simply, plainly, and directly.
Despite its impressive pedigree, however, some critics still charge that plain English is uneducated baby-talk unfit for the practice of law. Plain-language critic Jack Stark, for example, has called plain-English writing “dumb-downed.” Read More
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by Matthew Salzwedel
on March 27, 2013
Please join me and Andy Mergendahl on April 12, at 9:00 a.m., at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota for Effective Legal Writing — Getting Back to Basics. The CLE will also be streamed online as a webinar.
Andy and I will discuss the basics of brief writing and contract drafting, and we’ll also give tips about how to practice effectively before the Minnesota Court of Appeals and district courts.
Minnesota Legal Services State Support is sponsoring the CLE, and it has applied for 2.0 hours of Minnesota standard CLE credit.
To sign up, please visit this website for more information. We hope that you will join us on April 12.
(photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/26254305@N08/5853352145/)
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by Matthew Salzwedel
on February 11, 2013
Last week at Lawyerist, readers were treated to two competing views about the importance of sweating the small stuff in legal writing.
In Two Spaces After a Period? Who Cares?, Sybil Dunlop said that she treats certain punctuation and grammar rules as “guidelines,” which she jettisons if they conflict with a superior’s whims, or if they don’t mesh with her personal style.
In Don’t Miss These Marks in Your Legal Writing, I argued that lawyers who have a loose attitude towards following generally accepted punctuation and grammar rules risk having readers question their professional competence and rigor.
Am I being too fussy when I say that lawyers — as professional writers — should strive to follow generally accepted punctuation and grammar rules? Not at all. Read More
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