Legal Research

"Question: Why Don't Lawyers Hyphenate Phrasal Adjectives?"

Posted by Wayne Schiess: "A commenter asks:

Why don't legal writers use the hyphen [for phrasal adjectives]? I would say 90% of legal writers do not use it.

I have a theory with two supporting reasons. The theory is that they don't know any better. Here are the two supporting reasons:

1. Most people, lawyers included, get too little writing training in high school, college, and law school. If I had received strong, intense writing training in high school and college, I might have known about the phrasal-adjective hyphen sooner.
2.  Lawyers are not good at consulting writing sources. There are many style guides out there, and there are even several legal-writing guides out there. All the style guides, legal and nonlegal, tell you to hyphenate phrasal adjectives. But too few lawyers have them and consult them.

 This raises the question why. Why do we not consult writing sources enough. We're too busy? We're ignorant of our own writing deficiencies? We're overconfident about our writing knowledge? Yes."

Source: Legalwriting.net Blog, 28 April 2009

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on May 05, 2009 (boomark / email).