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Making Your Case

By standdown

ABA Journal has a number of excerpts, here, from Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges by Justice Antonin Scalia and legal writing maven Bryan Garner.  Here's one:To say that your writing must be clear and brief is not to say that it must be dull. Of course, you should employ the usual devices of effective writing: simile, metaphor, understatement, analogy and antithesis. But you shouldn?t use these or other devices of style for their own sake. They are helpful only if they cause the serious legal points you?re making to be more vivid, more lively and hence more memorable. Three simple ways to add interest to your writing are to enliven your word choices, mix up your sentence structures and vary your sentence lengths. With words, ask yourself whether there?s a more colorful way to put it...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on April 29, 2008 (boomark / email).