LawProse Lesson 389: Are you writing a brief because it’s due?

We hope not. It’s not the best reason to write. We hope you’re writing because you have an argument—or a series of arguments—to make on behalf of a client. You must have something worth communicating. Otherwise, you’d just be filling pages—and what you’d say would probably be forced, vacillating, and only half-true. You’d be doing …

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LawProse Lesson 388: A Prewriting Checklist for Effective Legal Writing.

Many people start writing before they know what they want to say—even before they know precisely what they hope to achieve. The result is typically flabby, disorganized, verbose prose. The best way to produce good writing is to follow a procedure. Until you have lots of experience and self-knowledge as a writer, you can benefit from …

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LawProse Lesson 386: There is no mystery to good legal writing.

You want to write well in law? Not just to write—which any lawyer can do—but to write well. The distinction between writing and writing well is the difference between shooting baskets in your driveway and high-level competitive basketball, between humming tunes and virtuoso vocal performances, between duffers’ rounds of golf and tournament victories. There’s no mystery about how to write effective …

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LawProse Lesson #384: The differences between speech and writing.

Many years ago, Judge Jerome Frank of the Second Circuit wrote that writing is essentially “speech heightened and polished.” Writing is what you would say if you talked ideally. It should be the equivalent of speech at considered leisure. At its best, then, prose is always natural-sounding to the reader’s ear—to the mind’s ear. There are three …

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