Legal Writing

In March, I wrote about the use of readability formulas. But there's another tool you can use to measure the readability of a draft--a tool that takes an actual reader into account.

This tool is based on the fact that at the level of sentences and words, the most readable writing is also the most predictable. Readable writing generally (not always, of course) fulfills the reader's expectations. Therefore, you can test the readability of a draft by leaving out selected words and having a reader guess what they are.

This week, consider trying this tool (it's formally called a "cloze test"):

1. Count back 100 or 200 words from the end of your draft. (The exact number doesn't matter.)
2. Go through this ending and replace every tenth word--whatever that word is--with a blank. Make all blanks the same length, regardless of the lengths of the words they replace.
3. Save this changed draft under a different name (so you can get back to your original).
4. Ask someone else to read this copy of your draft and guess the missing words.
5. Note the "hits" and "misses," and ask yourself whether each miss could have been a hit if it, or words before it, were changed. (Not all misses are bad things. Any writing will, and should, have some surprises.)
6. If you discover places where rewriting will help, do similar rewriting throughout your draft.