LawProse Lessons

You have friends named Jennings and Reynolds—the Jennings family and the Reynolds family, also known as the Jenningses and the Reynoldses. (Those are the only grammatical plurals for those names.) A large group is having a get-together at the Jenningses’ house. Or is it at the Reynoldses’ house? Either way, it’ll be delightful. Last week,

Among the most neglected aspects of basic grammar is how to make the plural possessive of a name ending in –s. It’s ignored in all editions of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, which announces on page one how to make a singular possessive—recommending Charles’s friend and Burns’s poem. It’s neglected in the AP

Few realize just how important lawyers have been to English-language studies. The first English-language dictionary (John Rastell, 1523) was by a lawyer—a law dictionary that antedated the first general dictionary (Robert Cawdrey, 1604) by 81 years. The first dictionaries to cite authorities and stress etymology were likewise by a lawyer (Thomas Blount, 1656, 1670). That

Does your organization have a style manual? The benefits are many: a style manual settles thousands of little points of doubt in writing. For a singular possessive, do you write Jones’s (CMOS, Redbook) or Jones’ (AP)? For a plural possessive, do you write Joneses’ (every authority) or Jones’s (no authority)? Do you use the serial

In June 2020, the AP Stylebook changed its policy to favor capitalizing Black whenever the word is used in a racial, ethnic, or cultural sense. Meanwhile, white would be lowercase even in corresponding senses. The change occurred after years of consideration and close study. Here’s the reasoning. Most white people in North America can and

First, establish deadlines for each step. Then: Step One: Have everyone draft two to three deep issues, not to exceed 75 words apiece. (See The Winning Brief 104–09 [3d ed. 2014].) Step Two: The team leader cherry-picks the best issue statements, puts together a master draft using no more than four issues, and circulates it for edits and improvements—insisting

What’s a quotation sandwich? It’s a means of making quotations an integral part of your writing. You don’t just plunk them on the page. You introduce them informatively and follow up smoothly. Though rare among legal writers, quotation sandwiches are delectable. They overcome a problem we often hear about from appellate judges and law-firm partners.

In September 2021, in the Wall Street Journal, LawProse founder and leader Bryan A. Garner reviewed Justice Stephen Breyer’s edifying new book The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics (Harvard, 2021). If you read the print edition, it’s on page A13. If you have an online subscription, you can read it here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-authority-of-the-court-and-the-peril-of-politics-review-on-judicial-supremacy-11631052401. Now for the

If there’s one thing that LawProse is famous for, it’s teaching lawyers how to frame legal problems clearly—so that readers will almost instantly understand what’s going on. It’s a tall order. If you’re engaged in advocacy or analysis, the most important thing is stating the problem clearly on page one. Right at the beginning. No

They’re called malapropisms: humorous misapplications of words, usually because of a similarity in spelling, sound, or stress pattern. Our favorite recent example appeared last week when the New York Times printed, in large type, *low and behold in place of the age-old lo and behold. The word lo derives from Old English (450–1099) as an interjection that directs attention to the

You’ve surely heard of preventive lawyering, preventive maintenance, and preventive medicine. What they denote is related to the old adage: a stitch in time saves nine. But an extra stitch is often added to the word: the additional syllable in *preventative. That’s what you hear if you listen to many TV commentators. One popular announcer

Most kids begin to learn punctuation from ages 8 to 11. It’s a highly impressionable age. The curriculum is fairly standard except on one recurrent point: do you or don’t you put a comma before the and or or that introduces the final item in a list? Some curricula say yes; others say no. A

At LawProse, we’ve long stressed the capital importance of openers. We’ve likened the first paragraph of a brief—a good one, anyway—to the fanfare in a Sousa march. It announces the song. The point was reinforced recently in a BBC interview with the composer Monty Norman, who wrote the memorable theme song for the James Bond