by Matthew Salzwedel
on November 10, 2012
As Adam Freedman points out in The Party of the First Part: The Curious World of Legalese, the Precision School in legal writing believes that “[t]he multiple subordinate clauses and technical jargon found in legal documents are there to describe highly complex relationships and to stamp out ambiguity.”
But which paragraph below makes more sense to you?
Does the first paragraph, which is written in Plain English, create more ambiguity than the second paragraph, which is riddled with legalese? Which paragraph would a non-lawyer businessperson understand? Which paragraph is more likely to result in litigation over the scope and meaning of its terms? I think the answers to those questions are fairly obvious. Read More
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by Matthew Salzwedel
on November 2, 2012
In his Usage Tip of the Day, Bryan Garner discusses the origin of the word “Snoot”:
In the April 2001 issue of Harper’s, the late David Foster Wallace introduced his family’s acronym for “syntax nudnik of our time” or, alternatively, “Sprachegefuhl necessitates our ongoing tendance.” (A fuller version of Wallace’s influential essay, purportedly a review essay of the first edition of this book, appears in Wallace’s Consider the Lobster [2006], at pp. 66-127, under the title “Authority and American Usage.”) The word denotes a well-informed language-lover and word connoisseur. It aptly captures the linguistic snootiness of those who weigh their words, value verbal nuances, resist the societal tendency to blur useful distinctions, reject newfangled usages without strong redeeming qualities, and concern themselves with linguistic tradition and continuity.
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by Matthew Salzwedel
on October 1, 2012
I recently published—with W. Joseph Bruckner—a chapter for the American Antitrust Institute’s Private Enforcement of Antitrust Law in the United States: A Handbook. Edward Elgar published the Handbook, which the American Antitrust Institute describes as providing “a detailed, step-by-step examination of the private enforcement process, as illuminated by many of the country’s leading practitioners, experts, and scholars.”
In addition, please check out my weekly column for Lawyerist. There, I’ve been writing about legal-writing topics like lawyers’ comfort words, misused homophones, legal writing by committee, and scrubbing adverbs from your legal writing.
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