Verbs that want to become nouns--why?
One commenter has noticed that lawyers often use nominalizations when another form would sound more natural or be easier to read:
Where do you think they pick up the habit?he asks.
I don't know, but I have some guesses:
From judicial opinions. But that just begs the question because we must now ask where the judges--who are legal writers, after all--pick up the habit.
From a desire to sound serious and formal. Sure, but how do lawyers know that nominalizations will make them sound serious and formal? No one teaches that overtly.
From a laziness about picking and using strong verbs. Every book on writing that I've ever read has recommended strong, vigorous verbs. But using good verbs consistently is hard work. So maybe lawyers are lazy about some aspects of their writing.
Another commenter hinted at a cause of the nominalization habit when he said plain-language advocates should focus more on:
the underlying grammatical processes that lawyers unconsciously use to create a specialized discourse.I think this means that lawyers use nominalizatons in part to sound like lawyers--to identify themselves as members of the legal discourse community. Okay, but how do they know that nominalizations will make them sound legal?
2 Comments:
I think it is not lawyers only who use tactics like nominalization to help themselves sound smart and sophisticated. Freshman writers do it, too. Like lawyers, freshman writers don't know it doesn't work.
I have a different theory about the source of lawyer discourse. I think much of the problem (to the extent it is one) with legal writing is that it is based upon fear.
Young lawyers fear being wrong. They fear error as though to err is fatal (maybe fatal to your career, but not life-threatening). To limit the chance that they are wrong, young laywers turn to qualifiers and equivocations. An outgrowth of writing in this way is the difficulty with writing in strong and direct manner. It is very hard to use powerful action verbs when every sentence contains multiple escape clauses. Lawyers seem to believe, especially in litigation, that they can always salvage the argument or position, so long as there is a way to change their position with mushy language.
How often do lawyers write junk like, "Having evaluated your contentions and cosidered the applicable authority, it is evident that your client's position is unsustainable," when they could just say, "Your client's interpretation is wrong"? Fear.
The really good writers in the legal field have embraced their fear and just state their position with the confidence that, win or lose, clarity and certainty are better than weakness.
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