LawProse Lessons

Can a case “hold” something? Yes. It’s fine to write that a certain case held something {Erie held . . .}, rather than to say that the court, in that case, held such and such {The court in Erie held . . .}. This practice is an innocuous form of hypallage, which is a figure […]

Should you use a singular or plural pronoun when referring to an entity? A pronoun must agree in number with its antecedent. Although that rule is usually simple enough, it becomes a little tricky when the antecedent is a collective noun — a word that is singular in form but denotes a group of people

Multiple punctuation marks. After last week’s lesson on punctuation with quotation marks, a few people asked how to punctuate a midsentence quotation that ends in a question mark. For example: By first deliberately stating an incorrect version of the events and then asking, “That’s the way it happened, isn’t it?” the detective lured the suspect

Correct placement of punctuation in relation to quotation marks. A common grammatical concern is how to punctuate around a quotation correctly. Does a semicolon go inside or outside the closing quotation mark? What about a question mark? What if the quotation itself is a question? And what if you have nested quotations? Here are some

Were you summonsed or summoned to appear in court? Although summonsed isn’t downright wrong, in modern legal usage it’s much preferable to say that someone was summoned to appear in court. Summons as a verb dates from the 17th century. It has been used to mean (1) “to cite to appear before a court, judge,

Whether whether causes problems for legal writers. Yes, it does — in four ways: (1) in issue statements, (2) in the common misusage of if for whether, (3) in needless instances of whether or not, and (4) in the proper phrasing of an appositive (question whether vs. question of whether vs. question as to whether).

What’s the easiest way to improve most transactional drafting? Rigorously impose a consistent numbering system, create more headings, and banish romanettes. Use a cascading left-hand indent. Ideally, the numbering has four levels of breakdown. That’s all you’ll normally need: Imposing this format on existing documents has several advantages. First, you’ll discover many needless inconsistencies in

The biggest mistake in motion practice. What’s the biggest mistake commonly made in motion practice? It’s getting off to a bad start, typically with a repugnant paragraph containing cumbersome boilerplate and parenthetical definitions that insult the judge’s intelligence. A brief that gets off to a bad start is a bad brief. There is no recovering.

Is it properly brinkmanship or brinksmanship? Brinkmanship. There’s no s after the brink, though many people mistakenly add it on the analogy of gamesmanship (which applies to all types of games and competitions). The forthcoming 10th edition of Black’s Law Dictionary will contain this entry: brinkmanship. (1956) A method of gaining a negotiating advantage by

Compound words: Is it healthcare, health-care, or health care? The better practice is to write it as a solid, unhyphenated word: healthcare. You’ll save yourself grief and, to the extent your writing endures, you’ll look better in the long run. Although the two-word form health care is more common today, the trend is clearly toward

Phrasal verbs and their corresponding nouns. A phrasal verb is a verb teamed up with a preposition or adverb (such as up in this sentence). The word after the verb is traditionally called a particle, and it often gives the verb a meaning different from what it would have on its own. (Compare: pass up,

Hyphenating phrasal adjectives (Part 2). Last week we began a study of phrasal adjectives. It gets complicated. One correspondent said she’d never hyphenate high-school dropout (though the Wall Street Journal advises doing so). But high school dropout might suggest a glue-sniffing former truant. You see? Ambiguities can pop up where you least expect them. The

The art of hyphenating phrasal adjectives.      When a phrase functions as an adjective, the phrase should ordinarily be hyphenated. Professional writers and editors regularly do this. Search for hyphens on a page of the Wall Street Journal or the New Yorker and you’ll spot many. But less-polished writers often fail to appreciate the difference

When should you hyphenate prefixes? If you want your writing to have professional polish, resist the urge to hyphenate prefixes. In American English, words with prefixes are generally made solid {codefendant, nonstatutory, pretrial}. Modern usage omits most hyphens after prefixes even when it results in a doubled letter {misspell, posttrial, preemption, reelection}. But there are

Further affiant sayeth naught. Many affidavits close with this classic legalese or some variation of it. Other than the obvious questions (“What does it mean?” and “Is it necessary?”), this phrase gives rise to two stylistic dilemmas. First, is it sayeth or saith? Among American lawyers who use the phrase (British lawyers don’t), sayeth predominates.

What’s wrong with putting “WITNESSETH” at the head of a contract? It harks back to an old mistake dating from mid-20th-century formbooks. Witnesseth, you see, is an archaic third-person singular form of the verb (witness), equivalent to cometh (The Ice Man cometh) or sayeth (Further affiant sayeth naught). It would make sense, in Elizabethan English,

Is snoot really a word? Yes: It is an acronym coined by the family of David Foster Wallace, who introduced the term to the literary world in his essay “Authority and American Usage” in Consider the Lobster 66-127 (2006). The word stands for either “Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance” or “Syntax Nudniks of Our Time.”

The IP bar’s special use of comprise. In the best normal usage, comprise means “to be made up of exclusively.” But intellectual-property lawyers use it in a different sense, as a synonym of the nonexclusive word include. The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit long ago anointed this peculiar usage. Here’s what

*Is comprised of Fastidious use of comprise has become increasingly rare. Garner’s Modern American Usage labels the form *is comprised of as “invariably inferior” (that’s what the asterisk signifies), yet gauges its acceptance in actual use as Stage 4 on the 5-stage “language-change index.” To you as a legal writer, that means using the phrase