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Miscellaneous

the (new) legal writer

A collection of resources for lawyers, who write. From Raymond Ward, an appellate lawyer with Adams and Reese LLP in New Orleans.

Post Frequency: 5.3/day

Last Entry: March 26, 2011 at 15:44:07

Louisiana appellate seminar this Friday

Posted on March 24, 2008
The Louisiana State Bar Association is presenting an appellate seminar this Friday, March 28, in New Orleans, at the Sheraton on Canal Street. The theme of the seminar is ???Views From the Inside.??? The people providing the insider???s view will...

The most beautiful sentence I?ve ever read

Posted on March 21, 2008
On Good Friday last year, I posted this on my other blog. I thought I?d run it here this year. ?There is still something to me almost incredible in the idea of a young Galilean peasant imagining that he could...

The most beautiful sentence I???ve ever read

Posted on March 21, 2008
On Good Friday last year, I posted this on my other blog. I thought I???d run it here this year. ???There is still something to me almost incredible in the idea of a young Galilean peasant imagining that he could...

Persuasion in 2,500 easy steps

Posted on March 20, 2008
ChangingMinds.org is a web site covering ?all aspects of how we change what others think, believe, feel and do.? Go there and wander around a bit; you?ll probably learn something you didn?t know. (Hat tip: Visual Thesaurus.)

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Persuasion in 2,500 easy steps

Posted on March 20, 2008
ChangingMinds.org is a web site covering ???all aspects of how we change what others think, believe, feel and do.??? Go there and wander around a bit; you???ll probably learn something you didn???t know. (Hat tip: Visual Thesaurus.)

The world?s hardest English vocabulary test

Posted on March 12, 2008
If you?d like to succeed William F. Buckley Jr., find out whether you?re up to the task by taking Brad Schorr?s World?s Hardest Vocabulary Test. Brad lists 57 words and will give you an A+ if you know 20 of...

The world???s hardest English vocabulary test

Posted on March 12, 2008
If you???d like to succeed William F. Buckley Jr., find out whether you???re up to the task by taking Brad Schorr???s World???s Hardest Vocabulary Test. Brad lists 57 words and will give you an A+ if you know 20 of...

A glitch in the feed

Posted on March 07, 2008
Today I noticed a glitch in this blog?s RSS feed: my Bloglines reader was picking up somebody else?s blog. The problem cleared up when I unsubscribed and resubscribed to this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/typepad/raymondpward/newlegalwriter If you noticed the same problem, please send...

Hurray for me

Posted on March 05, 2008
You?re looking at the TypePad Featured Blog du jour.

Footnotes in drafts

Posted on March 05, 2008
Evan Schaeffer provides an interesting suggestion for recording notes to himself in a draft: Drop a footnote, ?to add a note to [your]self about questions or revisions, or as a placeholder for a digression that can later be moved to...

Back to school

Posted on March 05, 2008
Here are some excellent tips on revision by the SAGES Peer Writing Crew, a group of undergraduate writing tutors at Case Western Reserve University. Though these tips were written for undergrads, they work equally well for lawyers and others who...

The right tool for the job

Posted on March 04, 2008
Here is an article I wrote for the Winter 2008 issue of Certworthy about selecting the right font for a writing project. The skinny version: For text in briefs, use a book-like font such as Book Antiqua, Bookman Old Style,...

Your brain will explode

Posted on March 03, 2008
The JALWD, the world?s best English-language journal of legal writing (Sorry, Scribes), is now available on line, courtesy of ALWD. Browse the current issues and the archives, but try not to cut yourself on those cutting edges. (Hat tip to...

Orwell on ethos (or lack thereof)

Posted on March 02, 2008
?The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one?s real and one?s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.?? George Orwell, Politics and the English Language...

Watch this

Posted on March 01, 2008
Bryan Garner has interviewed eight of the current U.S. Supreme Court justices, seeking their views on legal writing. Now LawProse has uploaded videos of those interviews on one web page. Watch and learn. (Hat-tip trail: Simple Justice, via Underdog.)

Snap judgments

Posted on February 23, 2008
The ABA Journal reports on a psychological study suggesting that judges often base their decisions on intuition rather than deliberate analysis. For lawyers, this phenomenon is either a problem or an opportunity. For writing tips on making it the latter, by influencing those judicial snap judgments to go your way, read John Bursch?s excellent article, Appealing to Judicial Snap Judgments...

The Conan brief

Posted on February 21, 2008
What part does emotion play in briefwriting? This question is debated in a pair of blog posts. The first, on MoneyLaw, decries what it terms the ?Conan brief,? one that demands an emotional reaction from the judge:Many lawyers mistakenly structure their arguments so that they demand an emotional investment from judges...

Dialectic

Posted on February 21, 2008
This morning?s post about the Conan brief prompted me to remember Hegel?s theory of dialectic, something I learned in seminary philosophy courses back in the 1970s. Professor Eric Steinhart sums up the process of hegelian dialectic this way:?Hegel stresses the paradoxical nature of consciousness; he knows that the mind wants to know the whole truth, but that it cannot think without drawing a distinction...

Two lessons

Posted on February 20, 2008
Alaska Employment Law calls our attention to a recent minute entry teaching two lessons about proper record citation: If the court has a local rule for citing something, follow the rule. If you don?t follow # 1 above, the court may not consider the material lacking a proper citation...

How to write for the client.

Posted on February 17, 2008
The good folks at What About Clients? care about good legal writing. By eliminating the legalese and communicating like a human being, a lawyer can produce client-centered writing: something primarily for the client; something the client can readily understand...

Impurity is sometimes good.

Posted on February 16, 2008
Most connoisseurs of good legal writing know that two of its finest artisans are Seventh Circuit Judges Frank Easterbrook and Richard Posner. What is it about their writing that we like so much? It?s their impure writing, which Posner himself describes as ?impure...

Watch this.

Posted on February 14, 2008
Here is a one-hour video lecture on persuasive legal writing, given by Illinois lawyer Helen Gunnarsson. Everyone can watch it for free, while Illinois lawyers can get one hour?s CLE credit for $19.95. (Hat tip to Evan Schaeffer.)

SPOGG

Posted on February 08, 2008
A recent addition to the legal-writing blogroll is the SPOGG blog. SPOGG stands for the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, which promotes National Grammar Day and urges you to ?grab a red pen and join the party.? I guess they?ll party like it?s as if it were 1999.

When passive voice should be used

Posted on February 06, 2008
Generally you should prefer the active voice to passive voice. A sentence in active voice is more direct and less verbose than one expressing the same thought in passive voice. But this is a general rule, not an absolute rule. Sometimes the passive voice enables you to put the most important words where they will be most noticed: the end of the sentence or its beginning...

A writer of plays is a ...

Posted on February 02, 2008
Until a minute ago, I thought that the writer of a play was a playwrite. But as Daily Writing Tips explains, the correct spelling is playwright. The suffix comes not from the verb write, but from the noun wright, meaning one who constructs or repairs something, such as a shipwright or wheelwright.

A public thank-you and another plug for the DRI Appellate Seminar

Posted on January 26, 2008
Last month I plugged the DRI Appellate Advocacy Seminar, to be held February 28-29 in Orlando. Since then, the calendar has changed from 2007 to 2008, which means that some of you have a new CLE budget to work with. So if you refrained from registering in 2007 because your CLE budget was tapped out, now is your chance to spend 2008 dollars on a first-rate seminar...

A new sidebar feature

Posted on January 26, 2008
I?ve added an appellate blogroll to this blog?s sidebar, for two reasons. First, many appellate blogs have blogrolled The (New) Legal Writer, so I wanted a means of returning the favor. Second, many readers of this blog are appellate lawyers, and I thought they would appreciate this feature.

You can never be too careful.

Posted on January 23, 2008
The past several days, I?ve been working on a U.S. Fifth Circuit brief. It?s a moderately sized brief: 45 pages of substance (double-spaced, 14-point typeface), about 9,650 words. Today was the filing deadline. I had read, re-read, and re-re-read this brief, so I thought it was in pretty good shape...

Buy low, sell high, and write well.

Posted on January 19, 2008
In this paper, Mark Sellers tells a roomful of Harvard MBA students the seven traits of outstanding investors. Number six is to engage both sides of the brain. A left-brained person, Sellers points out, can ?do things such as judging a management team from subtle cues they give off,? and can ?step back and take a big picture view of certain situations rather than analyzing them to death...

Why legal-writing teachers sometimes feel like Rodney Dangerfield

Posted on January 16, 2008
It???s nice that LSU???s English Department offers a course in legal writing. Unfortunately for the students who signed up for the course this semester, the department forgot to assign a teacher.

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