The Lawyer's Guide to Writing Well

This eminently practical volume demystifies legal writing, outlines the causes and consequences of bad writing, and prescribes straightforward, easy-to-apply remedies that will make your writing readable. Complete with usage notes that address lawyers' most common errors, this well-organized book is both an invaluable tool for practicing lawyers and a sensible grounding for law students. This much-revised second edition contains a set of editing exercises (and a suggested revision key with explanations) to test your skill. This book is a definitive guide to becoming a better writer—and a better lawyer.

Tom Goldstein is former Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and author of Killing the Messenger: 100 Years of Media Criticism (1989) and The News at Any Cost: How Journalists Compromise Their Ethics to Shape the News (1985). Jethro K. Lieberman is Associate Dean, Professor of Law, and Director of the Writing Program at New York Law School, as well as Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. He is the coauthor of The Lawyer's Craft: An Introduction to Legal Analysis, Writing, Research, and Advocacy (2002) and author of A Practical Companion to the Constitution: How the Supreme Court Has Ruled on Issues from Abortion to Zoning (California, 1999).

Preface

Part I. Why Lawyers Write Poorly
1. Does Bad Writing Really Matter?
2. Don’t Make It Like It Was

Part 2. The Process of Writing
3. Ten Steps to Writing
4. Of Dawdlers and Scrawlers, Pacers, and Plungers: Getting Started and Overcoming Blocks
5. The Mechanics of Getting It Down: From Quill Pens to Computers
6. Lessons from a Writing Audit
7. Lawyers as Publishers: Words Are Their Product

Part 3. Managing Your Prose
8. Writing the Lead
9. Form, Structure, and Organization
10. Wrong Words, Long Sentences, and Other Mister Meaners
11. Revising Your Prose
12. Making Your Writing Memorable

Notes
Usage Notes
An Editing Checklist
Editing Exercises
Suggested Revisions to Editing Exercises
Reference Works
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Index