Legal Writing in Plain English, Second Edition: A Text with Exercises

by Bryan A. Garner

Overview

Admirably clear, concise, down-to-earth, and powerful—all too often, legal writing embodies none of these qualities. Its reputation for obscurity and needless legalese is widespread. Since 2001 Bryan A. Garner’s Legal Writing in Plain English has helped address this problem by providing lawyers, judges, paralegals, law students, and legal scholars with sound advice and practical tools for improving their written work. Now the leading guide to clear writing in the field, this indispensable volume encourages legal writers to challenge conventions and offers valuable insights into the writing process that will appeal to other professionals: how to organize ideas, create and refine prose, and improve editing skills.
Accessible and witty, Legal Writing in Plain English draws on real-life writing samples that Garner has gathered through decades of teaching experience. Trenchant advice covers all types of legal materials, from analytical and persuasive writing to legal drafting, and the book’s principles are reinforced by sets of basic, intermediate, and advanced exercises in each section.
 In this new edition, Garner preserves the successful structure of the original while adjusting the content to make it even more classroom-friendly. He includes case examples from the past decade and addresses the widespread use of legal documents in electronic formats. His book remains the standard guide for producing the jargon-free language that clients demand and courts reward.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226031392
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	08/26/2013
Series:	Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	161,402
File size:	16 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Bryan A. Garner is president of LawProse, Inc., and the Distinguished Research Professor of Law at Southern Methodist University. The editor-in-chief of Black’s Law Dictionary, Garner is the author of several best-selling books, including Garner’sModern American Usage and, with Justice Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts and Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges.

Read an Excerpt

LEGAL WRITING IN PLAIN ENGLISH

A Text with Exercises

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By BRYAN A. GARNER

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Bryan A. Garner
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-28393-7

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CHAPTER 1

Framing Your Thoughts

§ 1. Have something to say—and think it through.

What's your biggest challenge as a writer? It's figuring out, from the mass of possibilities, exactly what your points are—and then stating them coherently, with adequate reasoning and support.

Although this advice might seem obvious, legal writers constantly ignore it. The result is a mushy, aimless style. Even with your point well in mind, if you take too long to reach it, you might as well have no point at all. Only readers with a high incentive to understand you will labor to grasp your meaning.

That's where law school comes in. Every law student must read and digest scads of diff use writing. You read through old cases that take forever to convey fairly straightforward points. You read law-review articles that take 50 pages to say what might be said more powerfully in 5. And as you read, your incentive for gleaning the main message remains high because your future in law depends on it. You have no choice but to wade through all that opaque prose.

Take, for example, a sentence from a judicial opinion. See if you can follow the court's point:

And in the outset we may as well be frank enough to confess, and, indeed, in view of the seriousness of the consequences which upon fuller reflection we find would inevitably result to municipalities in the matter of street improvements from the conclusion reached and announced in the former opinion, we are pleased to declare that the arguments upon rehearing have convinced us that the decision upon the ultimate question involved here formerly rendered by this court, even if not faulty in its reasoning from the premises announced or wholly erroneous in conclusions as to some of the questions incidentally arising and necessarily legitimate subjects of discussion in the decision of the main proposition, is, at any rate, one which may, under the peculiar circumstances of this case, the more justly and at the same time, upon reasons of equal cogency, be superseded by a conclusion whose effect cannot be to disturb the integrity of the long and well-established system for the improvement of streets in the incorporated cities and towns of California not governed by freeholders' charters.

What's the court saying? In a highly embellished style, it's simply saying, "We made a mistake last time." That's all.

If you add sentence after sentence in this style—all filled with syntactic curlicues—you end up with an even more impenetrable morass of words. The only readers who will bother to penetrate it are either law students or lawyers who are paid to do so.

However willing you might be to pierce through another writer's obscurity, you must insist that your own writing never put your readers to that trouble. On the one hand, then, you'll need a penetrating mind as a reader to cut through overgrown verbal foliage. On the other hand, you'll need a focused mind as a writer to leave aside everything that doesn't help you swiftly communicate your ideas.

That's the start to becoming an effective legal writer.

Exercises

Begin each of the following exercises by looking up the case cited. Then write a case brief for each one—that is, a short case synopsis that follows a standard form: (1) case name and citation (in proper form); (2) brief facts; (3) question for decision; (4) holding; and (5) reasoning. Your finished product should fit on a five-by-seven-inch index card (front and back). The exercises are increasingly challenging for either or both of two reasons: first, the increasing complexity of the legal principles involved; and second, the increasing difficulty of the language used in the opinions. When you're finished, have a friend assess how easy it is to understand what you've written. Here's an example of a case brief:

Case: Henderson v. Ford Motor Co., 519 S.W.2d 87 (Tex. 1974).

Facts: While driving in city traffic, Henderson found that, despite repeated attempts, she couldn't brake. To avoid injuring anyone, she ran into a pole. An investigator later found that part of a rubber gasket from the air filter had gotten into the carburetor. Henderson sued Ford on various theories, including defective design. Her expert witness didn't criticize the design of the gasket, carburetor, or air filter, but did say that the positioning of the parts might have been better. No one testified that the air-filter housing was unreasonably dangerous from the time of installation. Yet the jury determined that the air-filter housing was defective and that this defect had caused Henderson's damage.

Question: The expert witness didn't testify that the design was unreasonably dangerous—only that it could be improved on. Is this testimony sufficient to support a jury finding that a product's design is unreasonably dangerous?

Holding: Mere evidence that a design could be made better—without evidence that the design itself was unreasonably dangerous—is insufficient to impose liability on a manufacturer.

Reasoning: A plaintiff in a design-defect case must provide some evidence that the design of the product made it unreasonably dangerous. Specifically, the evidence must show that a prudent manufacturer who was knowledgeable about the risks would not have placed the particular product in the stream of commerce. Mere speculation that a product might be improved on does not constitute evidence of a design defect. A manufacturer is not required to design the best product that is scientifically possible.

Basic

Write a case brief for People v. Nelson, 132 Cal. Rptr. 3d 856 (Ct. App. 2011). If you belong to a writing group or class, circulate a copy of your case brief to each colleague.

Intermediate

Write a case brief for Wilburn v. Commonwealth, 312 S.W.3d 321 (Ky. 2010). If you belong to a writing group or class, circulate a copy of your case brief to each colleague.

Advanced

Write a case brief for District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008). If you belong to a writing group or class, circulate a copy of your case brief to each colleague.

§ 2. For maximal efficiency, plan your writing projects. Try nonlinear outlining.

Writers work in various ways, often experimenting with many methods before settling into certain habits. But most writers need a way to set down their yet-unformed ideas in some way other than a top-to-bottom order.

Once you've thought of some points to make—even if they're not fully formed—you've already begun the writing process. But you're not yet ready to begin writing sentences and paragraphs. You're ready to start outlining, which itself can be a multistep process. Here I'll discuss producing an outline that probably won't resemble the outlines you've tried for other writing projects. More on this in a moment. First, let's break down the writing process into its component parts.

It's useful to think of writing as a four-step process:

1. Think of things you want to say—as many as possible as quickly as possible.

2. Figure out a sensible order for those thoughts; that is, prepare an outline.

3. With the outline as your guide, swiftly write out a draft.

4. After setting the draft aside for some time (whether minutes or days), come back to it and edit.

These four steps derive from a system developed by Betty Sue Flowers, a former University of Texas English professor. She has named each of the steps: (1) Madman, the creative spirit who generates ideas; (2) Architect, the planner who ensures that the structure is sound and appealing; (3) Carpenter, the builder who makes the corners square and the counters level; and (4) Judge, who checks to see whether anything has gone wrong. Each character represents a separate intellectual function that writers must work through.

The Madman, essentially, is your imagination. This character, though some times brilliant, is almost always sloppy. When you're in the Madman phase, you're going for copious thoughts—as many as possible. Ideally, though, you won't be writing out sentences and paragraphs. Rather, you'll be jotting down ideas. And if you get into the swing of it, your jottings will come fast and furious.

You'll need to protect the Madman against the Judge, who hates the Madman's sloppiness. If you don't restrain the Judge in these early stages of the writing process, the Madman could be at considerable risk. Writers commonly have little battles in their heads if the hypercritical Judge is allowed to start censoring ideas even as the Madman is trying to develop them. The result is writer's block. The one thing all slow writers seem to have in common is that they will not go on to sentence two until sentence one is perfect. By the time they get to the end of the paragraph, the Judge still isn't satisfied, so they cross it out and start again. Fast writers never bring in the Judge that early in the writing process; this enables them to use the process to discover what they have to say. The perfectionistic, Judge-dominated writers view their initial efforts as producing a final product, which is why it takes them so much longer to get it done. So learn to keep the Judge out of the Madman's way.

The other steps are equally important.

Once you've let the Madman come up with ideas—in no particular order—the Architect must arrange them. But it's virtually impossible for the Architect to work well until the Madman has had free rein for a while. Although initially the Architect's work might be nonlinear, you'll ultimately need a linear outline—a plan that shows the steps on the way from the beginning, through the middle, to the end. Typically, in legal writing, you'll arrange your points from the most to the least important—and then clinch the argument or analysis with a strong closer.

The Architect's work product should be in complete sentences—not mere phrases. Why? You should be working with full propositions, not just scraps of ideas. A good outline can be as simple as three propositions arranged in their most logical and powerful order.

Next is the Carpenter's turn in the lead. This is where you begin writing in earnest. Following the Architect's specifications, the Carpenter builds the draft, joining sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph. Of course, the Architect's blueprint makes the Carpenter's job much easier. Ideally, the Carpenter writes quickly, treating the outline as a series of points that need elaboration.

For many people, the carpentry is the most unpleasant part of writing. They find it hard to sit down and produce a draft. But this problem stems largely from skipping the Madman and Architect stages—as if any writer could do three things at once: think of ideas, sequence them, and verbalize them. That's not the way it works, even for superb writers. In any event, the Carpenter's job becomes relatively easy if the Madman and Architect have done competent work beforehand.

Again, the Judge must stay out of the Carpenter's way. If you're constantly stopping yourself to edit the Carpenter's work, you're slowing yourself down. And you're getting into a different frame of mind—that of editor, as opposed to writer. Still, though, the Carpenter exercises considerable discretion in following the Architect's plans and makes architectural refinements here and there when producing paragraphs and sections.

When you have a draft, no matter how rough, the Judge can finally take over. For many writers, this is where the fun begins. You have the makings of a solid piece of writing, but now you can fix the ragged edges. The Judge does everything from smoothing over rough transitions to cutting unnecessary words to correcting grammar, spelling, and typos. An alternative name for the Judge is "Janitor" because a big part of what the Judge does is tidy up little messes.

Each character has an important role to play, and to the extent that you slight any of them, your writing will suffer. If you decide, for example, to "rough out" a draft by simply sitting down and writing it out, you'll be starting the whole process at the Carpenter phase. You'll be asking the Carpenter to do not just the carpentry but also the Madman's and the Architect's work. That's a tall order. People who write this way tend to produce bad work. And they tend to procrastinate.

If you decide that you can begin an outline with a Roman numeral, you'll still be asking a lot: the Architect will have to dream up ideas and sequence them simultaneously. And worse: whatever your I–II–III order happens to be at this early stage will probably become fossilized in later drafts. Most writers' minds aren't supple enough to allow part IV to become part I(D) in a later draft, even if it logically belongs there.

That's why it's critical to let the Madman spin out ideas in the early phases of planning a piece. Ideally, the ideas will come to you so fast and fluidly that it's hard to get them all down as your mind races.

One way to do this—to get yourself into the Madman frame of mind—is to use a nonlinear outline. Among lawyers, the most popular type of nonlinear outline is the whirlybird. It starts out looking like this:

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A shorthand name for the project goes in the center. Then you begin adding ideas—the more the better. For every major idea you have, use a branch off the center circle. For supporting ideas, try branching off from a major branch. Everything you might want to mention goes into the whirlybird—which has no top and no bottom. You're striving for copious thoughts without having to worry about where they go, how they fit together, or what they'll look like when put in the right order. Here's an example:

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Once you've finished a whirlybird—whether it takes ten minutes or ten hours—you'll probably find it easy to work the elements into a good linear outline. You'll know all the materials. It will just be a matter of having the Architect organize them sensibly. The next step might look like this:

An insurer's duty to settle requires proof of actual coverage, and the Milnes assert that they have proof of coverage. But in a previous, related proceeding, they proved up a default judgment by arguing that the person they now claim was negligent harmed them intentionally.

A. The district court did not find that there was coverage, so Panzan Insurance properly refused a settlement offer.

B. The Milnes cannot contradict the factual and legal position they took in state court:

(1) The equitable doctrine of judicial estoppel prevents a party from taking a position contradictory to the position taken on another issue or in a previous but related proceeding.

(2) In state court, the intentional nature of the act that harmed the Milnes was crucial to obtaining the default judgment, and they presented evidence of intent.

(3) The policy does not cover intentional actions, and the state-court evidence is fatal to their claim against Panzan, so the Milnes presented evidence that the act was not intentional.

Once you have this type of linear outline—something that many writers can create only if they do a nonlinear outline first—writing your first draft becomes much less intimidating. More on this in a moment.

Lawyers who have tried using the whirlybird before drafting a linear outline commonly cite several advantages:

• It encourages creativity. It helps you think of things you might otherwise miss. Brainstorming becomes easier because the creative mind tends to jump around. You eliminate the straitjacketing effect of As, Bs, and Cs, which can cause you to force ideas into premature categories.

• At the same time, the whirlybird can help in free-form categorizing.

• It makes getting started fairly easy. It's stress free. You can avoid writer's block.

• As some of the same ideas emerge in different contexts, you can see more clearly the interconnections between your ideas.

• It's a great way to discover your key points—and to distill your thoughts.

• Once you know all the options, you can more confidently select what your lead will be.

• The whirlybird is an excellent reminder of ideas that might otherwise get dropped.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from LEGAL WRITING IN PLAIN ENGLISH by BRYAN A. GARNER. Copyright © 2013 Bryan A. Garner. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Preface 
Introduction

Part One: Principles for All Legal Writing

1. Framing Your Thoughts
§ 1. Have something to say—and think it through.
§ 2. For maximal efficiency, plan your writing projects. Try nonlinear outlining.
§ 3. Order your material in a logical sequence. Present facts chronologically. Keep related material together.
§ 4. Divide the document into sections, and sections into subparts as needed. Use informative headings.

2. Phrasing Your Sentences
§ 5. Omit needless words.
§ 6. Keep your average sentence length to about 20 words.
§ 7. Keep the subject, the verb, and the object together—toward the beginning of the sentence.
§ 8. Use parallel phrasing for parallel ideas.
§ 9. Prefer the active voice over the passive.
§ 10. Avoid multiple negatives.
§ 11. End sentences emphatically.

3. Choosing Your Words
§ 12. Learn to detest simplifiable jargon.
§ 13. Use strong, precise verbs. Minimize is, are, was, and were.
§ 14. Simplify wordy phrases. Watch out for of.
§ 15. Turn -ion words into verbs when you can.
§ 16. Avoid doublets and triplets.
§ 17. Refer to people and companies by name. Never use corresponding terms ending in -ee and -or.
§ 18. Don’t habitually use parenthetical shorthand names. Use them only when you really need them.
§ 19. Shun newfangled acronyms.
§ 20. Make everything you write speakable.

Part Two: Principles Mainly for Analytical and Persuasive Writing

§ 21. Plan all three parts: the beginning, the middle, and the end.
§ 22. Use the “deep issue” to spill the beans on the first page.
§ 23. Summarize. Don’t overparticularize.
§ 24. Introduce each paragraph with a topic sentence.
§ 25. Bridge between paragraphs.
§ 26. Vary the length of your paragraphs, but generally keep them short.
§ 27. Provide signposts along the way.
§ 28. Unclutter the text by moving citations into footnotes.
§ 29. Weave quotations deftly into your narrative.
§ 30. Be forthright in dealing with counterarguments.

Part Three: Principles Mainly for Legal Drafting

§ 31. Draft for an ordinary reader, not for a mythical judge who might someday review the document.
§ 32. Organize provisions in order of descending importance.
§ 33. Minimize definitions and cross references. If you have more than just a few definitions, put them in a schedule at the end—not at the beginning.
§ 34. Break down enumerations into parallel provisions. Put every list of subparts at the end of the sentence—never at the beginning or in the middle.
§ 35. Delete every shall.
§ 36. Don’t use provisos.
§ 37. Replace and/or wherever it appears.
§ 38. Prefer the singular over the plural.
§ 39. Prefer numerals, not words, to denote amounts. Avoid word-numeral doublets.
§ 40. If you don’t understand a form provision—or don’t understand why it should be included in your document—try diligently to gain that understanding. If you still can’t understand it, cut it.

Part Four: Principles of Document Design

§ 41. Use a readable typeface.
§ 42. Create ample white space—and use it meaningfully.
§ 43. Highlight ideas with attention-getters such as bullets.
§ 44. Don’t use all capitals, and avoid initial capitals.
§ 45. For a long document, make a table of contents.

Part Five: Methods for Continued Improvement

§ 46. Embrace constructive criticism.
§ 47. Edit yourself systematically.
§ 48. Learn how to find reliable answers to questions of grammar and usage.
§ 49. Habitually gauge your own readerly likes and dislikes, as well as those of other readers.
§ 50. Remember that good writing makes the reader’s job easy; bad writing makes it hard.

Appendix A How to Punctuate

Appendix B Four Model Documents
1. Research Memorandum
2. Motion
3. Appellate Brief
4. Contract

Key to Basic Exercises
Index

Editorial Reviews

The importance of improving writing skills . . . is  also the central theme of one of my favourite books of the year: Garner’s Legal Writing in Plain English. Much more exciting than the title suggests, it leads the reader through a series of observations and exercises to develop a simple, clear and elegant writing style. My only regret is that it is written for a US market with corresponding examples. There is surely a need for a UK version, which should routinely be given to all law students, trainees and even some senior partners.

Times Higher Education Textbook Guide (UK) - Sarah Greer

"This easy-to-follow guide is useful both as a general course of instruction and as a targeted aid in solving particular legal writing problems."

Harvard Law Review

This magnificent book explains every major principle of plain legal writing in a way that no other book has ever done. Based on years of Garner’s research and teaching, this book elevates the standard of what a legal-writing text can and should be. Get a copy for every law student, lawyer, and legislator that you know.

Mark E. Wojcik

Interspersed with rules of good writing is a revolutionary manifesto packaged in a plain gray wrapper. This book won’t draw attention merely by sitting on your shelf, but if you put certain pieces of its advice in the next legal document you draft, you are sure to raise the eyebrows of any lawyer who reads it.

Trial

"Garner's work is a significant improvement [over other books] . . . . Those who are willing to approach the book systematically and to complete the exercises will see dramatic improvements in their writing."

Law Library Journal