Legal Writing

Richard J. Wegner Needs an Editor

Richard J. Wegner is like most attorneys — he could use a skilled and experienced editor.

Actually, he needs an attorney more than most. Let me show you what I mean.

A recent article by Wegner (?Change You Should Believe In??) begins with the following statement:

“Many tenants of antitrust law have remained constant throughout the years.”

Ouch!

It’s one thing to have a typo in an article. That’s forgivable. But if you want to charge people big bucks for access to a “recognized expert” you can’t let an article begin with such a notable error (tenants in place of tenets).

Why?

Because committing such an error is like being caught in an obvious lie — you lose credibility quickly, especially when you claim a keen ability to “anticipate and address problems before they arise.”

If you advertise that you don’t see problems even after they appear in print, who will believe your hyperbolic claim that you can see them before they arise?

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Would a skilled and experienced editor just fix that typo? Of course not.

With just that one fix, things get worse: a typographical failure is replaced with a logical one:

Many tenets of antitrust law have remained constant throughout the years.

Of course tenets tend to remain constant, else they wouldn’t be called tenets, would they?

To see what’s required, let’s consider the entire first paragraph of Wegner’s article:

Many tenants of antitrust law have remained constant throughout the years. For example, at the annual spring meeting of the Antitrust Section of the American Bar Association, government enforcers can be counted on to make one or more ?major announcements.? Second, courts analyzing mergers first define the relevant market as a ?necessary predicate? to finding anticompetitive effects. The former remained true again last week as the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission announced revisions to the Horizontal Merger Guidelines (?Guidelines?) at the spring meeting. However, market definition took a smack in the chops as enforcers announced that ?Market definition is not an end in itself; it is one of the tools that the agencies use to assess whether a merger is likely to lessen competition.? Why the dramatic change in the government?s approach to market definition? For the answer, we must take a few steps back and start somewhere near the beginning.

Does the second sentence follow from the first (i.e., does it provide an example of a truism)? Only if major announcements by government enforcers during an ABA meeting are fundamental to antitrust law.

Does the third sentence follow from the first? No, it doesn’t.

In the fourth sentence, what does “the former” mean?

The fifth sentence introduces a new topic (market definition), and that calls for a new paragraph.

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What Wegner wrote and Fredrikson & Byron published needs quite a bit more than one quick fix, and that’s because it starts with a disjointed paragraph that ignores sage advice, routinely dispensed by 8th-grade English teachers around the nation*:

A paragraph is a collection of related sentences dealing with a single topic.

* See Minnesota Standards for Language Arts K — 12

Full post as published by Set in Style on June 29, 2010 (boomark / email).