LawProse Lessons

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 …

LawProse Lesson #157: An Immediate Improvement for Contracts Read More »

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. …

LawProse Lesson #156: The biggest mistake in motion practice. Read More »

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 …

LawProse Lesson #155: Is it properly “brinkmanship” or “brinksmanship”? Read More »

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 …

LawProse Lesson #154: Compound words: Is it “healthcare,” “health-care,” or “health care”? Read More »

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, …

LawProse Lesson #153: Phrasal verbs and their corresponding nouns. Read More »

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 …

LawProse Lesson #152: Hyphenating phrasal adjectives (Part 2) Read More »

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 …

LawProse Lesson #151: The art of hyphenating phrasal adjectives. Read More »

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 …

LawProse Lesson #150: When should you hyphenate prefixes? Read More »

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. …

LawProse Lesson #149: “Further affiant sayeth naught” Read More »

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, …

LawProse Lesson #148: What’s wrong with WITNESSETH? Read More »

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.” …

LawProse Lesson #147: Is “snoot” really a word? Read More »

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 …

LawProse Lesson #146: The IP bar’s special use of “comprise” Read More »

*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 …

LawProse Lesson #145: *Is comprised of Read More »

Less vs. fewer Use fewer when referring to individual or countable things {fewer than ten chairs} {fewer questions asked by judges}. Use less when referring to volume, quantity, or degree {less influence on the jurors}, mass or bulk nouns {less water in the glass}, or units of measure or time {less than three ounces} {less …

LawProse Lesson #144: “Less” vs. “fewer” Read More »

When should you use a comma between two adjectives? Use a comma to separate coordinate adjectives — adjectives that qualify a noun in the same way {a long, complex trial}. To test whether the modifiers are coordinate, either (1) reverse their order, keeping the comma {a complex, long trial}, or (2) add and between them …

LawProse Lesson #143: When should you use a comma between two adjectives? Read More »

Is e-mails a correct plural, or should it be e-mail messages? People are naturally drawn to linguistic analogizing: we prefer neat correspondences. Some people therefore insist that because mail is an uncountable mass noun, e-mail must logically be a mass noun as well — and that e-mails is therefore wrong. These precisians demand e-mail messages. …

LawProse Lesson #142: Is “e-mails” a correct plural, or should it be “e-mail messages”? Read More »

Should it be e-mail or email? Two weeks ago, the New York Times officially dropped the hyphen in e-mail because of “popular demand,” according to its editor for news presentation, Patrick LaForge. The Associated Press Stylebook changed its style to the unhyphenated email in 2011, but it retained the hyphen in sister terms such as …

LawProse Lesson #141: Should it be “e-mail” or “email”? Read More »

Which is correct: a Cardinals fan or a Cardinals’ fan? Last week’s lesson about the possessive form of Red Sox ended with this sentence: “We’ll know shortly, but don’t jinx them with poor usage (unless, of course, you’re a Cardinals fan).” Should that have been written as a possessive: a Cardinals’ fan? Preferably not. Here, …

LawProse Lesson #140: Should the phrase “a Cardinals fan” be attributive or possessive? Read More »

What is the possessive form of Red Sox? The rule for plural possessives is to pluralize first, then form the possessive {woman>women>women’s} {shoe>shoes>shoes’}. But what happens when you have a playfully respelled plural for a word such as socks? That is, Sox is already considered plural: we say “the Red Sox are in the World …

LawProse Lesson #139: What is the possessive form of Red Sox? Read More »

Why is ’til considered an error for the preposition till? Why can’t it be regarded as an abbreviation of until? That simply doesn’t reflect the history of the words. Till has been considered a perfectly good preposition in general English since about 1300. It first appeared in northern varieties of Old English around 800. Until, …

LawProse Lesson #138: Why is “’til” considered an error for the preposition “till”? Read More »