Legal Writing Tips

Male lawyer sitting at workplace in office

Favor the Simple, Declarative Sentence

Resisting the urge to pack your sentences with numerous thoughts and details will make your writing easier to understand and thus, more effective. Use of sprawling, convoluted sentences—in legal memoranda, briefs to the court, judicial opinions, statutes, and transactional documents—is…

Conclude Forcefully

In the final section of your brief, don’t forget to remind the court why your side should win. All too often, having run out of time, space, and energy, you finally get to the end of the brief you’ve been…

When to Stay Away From Him, Her, and Them

In legal and other formal writing, when you don’t know the gender identity of a specific human individual and are not in a position to inquire, it’s best to avoid using any of the singular personal pronouns to refer to…

Embracing the Versatility of They

Success at persuasive writing depends in no small part on establishing credibility with the reader. With that in mind, it is wise to avoid outmoded, archaic phrases and terms—especially those that smack of gender bias and exclusivity. But trying to…

Artful Arguments

Minor usage error aside, U.S. Rep Adam Schiff wended his way in Trump’s impeachment trial from one stirring statement to the next. U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff’s remarks to the United States Senate during the impeachment trial were replete…

To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate?

Having explored the uses of the em-dash and the en-dash, we now come to the most commonly known of the dash punctuation marks: the hyphen. The hyphen’s main job is to connect two or more things that are closely…

Use an En-dash to Mark a Range of Things Like Dates and Numbers

After publication of last month’s column on uses of the em-dash, a reader emailed to ask why the instructions I shared for creating this punctuation mark call for leaving no space on either side of it. He asked the…

Use a Pair of Em-dashes to Mark Off an Abrupt Break in a Sentence or One to Emphasize the Text at the End

Depending on the context, an em-dash—so named because its width matches a typesetter’s capital M—can take the place of a comma, parenthesis, or a colon in a sentence. Because it signals an abrupt break in the text, the em-dash…

More Transition Words and Phrases

As promised, here is the second half of legal writing expert Ross Guberman’s handy list of transition words for lawyers and other advocates—organized according to the purpose of the sentence. (If you missed last month’s article, read it here: Broaden…

Broaden and Deepen Your Repertoire of Transitions

As we discussed last month, writing seamless paragraphs requires use of transitions, or logical connectors. The ones that appear most frequently in legal writing are moreover, additionally, however, furthermore, and nevertheless. The problem is that these words get old fast,…

Make Your Sentences Flow

Linking a sentence to the one that precedes it— in a way that makes it clear how the two relate—is as critical to good writing as building bridges between paragraphs. In other words, seamlessness within a paragraph is as important…

Legal Writing Tip: Bridge Your Paragraphs

A well-written piece of advocacy should be easy to read; the thoughts and ideas presented should flow seamlessly from one to the next. To achieve fluency, include in the first—usually topic—sentence of each paragraph (starting with the second in each…

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