Plain language: Short good; long bad
Research offers proof that gratuitously fancy words tend to make authors seem less intelligent than they would if they relied on shorter words."
Read about it here.
posted by Wayne Schiess at 8:18 AM
Legalwriting.net
Wayne Schiess's legal-writing blog. Home is here: Legalwriting.net
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Read about it here.
previous posts
- Plagiarism: it follows you after law school
- Haiku: The comma
- The memo: issue statement as syllogism
- The memo: issue statements
- Law-review writing: an example
- Drafting Legal Documents nonlawyers Can Read and U...
- Plain English: will it ever conquer all?
- Plain English: a reason to repeat conjunctions
- Word usage: "lower court"
- Writing in law practice: a student says . . .
Wayne's books
[Plain language] has a bad name among some lawyers. This is usually because they don't understand enough about it to judge it properly. --Michele M. Asprey, Plain Language for Lawyers 11 (2d ed., Federation Press 1996).
A related bonus of a plain language style is the potential for reducing mistakes. Traditional legal language tends to hide inconsistencies and ambiguities. Errors are harder to find in dense and convoluted prose. Removing legalese helps lay bare any oversights in the original. --Peter Butt & Richard Castle, Modern Legal Drafting: A Guide to Using Clearer Language 89 (Cambridge U. Press 2001).
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