Grammar and Mechanics

Transcript

Claudia Laycock: I hate to say there are a lot of attorneys out there that don’t write very well. And very often I’ll be reading it, I’ll have my law clerk come and look at it and we’ll look at it together and sometimes we still can’t figure out what it is they are trying to say. So their failure to write well and communicate with me hurts their case for their client and makes them a much less successful litigator on behalf of their client.

One of the things that would help attorneys become better writers is to have a firm grasp on mechanics. And by mechanics I’m talking about: spelling, grammar, punctuation. Punctuation’s a real problem. The misuse of punctuation makes your writing unclear and I don’t think there’s an attorney out there that knows how to use a comma well; too many commas, or not enough commas at all, or commas that make no sense. There are attorneys that think they’ve become more persuasive by using bold print, italics, and multiple exclamation points at the end of a sentence. I once took an attorney to task during a hearing and explained to him that by the time I had read his memorandum the night before, I felt that I’d been screamed at for fifteen pages because every time he thought something was important he would put it in all caps and sometimes he would bold it and sometimes he would italicize it and underline it and sometimes he would do all of that and end with about four exclamation points. And so as a judge it became difficult for me to keep track of what he was talking about because I was so annoyed by what he was doing with his mechanical efforts your readers will be so happy if you’re at least aware that there’s a difference between “its” and “it’s,” but the mechanics can make all the difference in first impressions. And it’s the first impression that’s going to get you past that first impression to somebody really considering what you’re reading.

James Christensen: I’m not sure I’m correct in doing so, but I do judge people by the way they write. I find myself making value judgments. If somebody is a sloppy writer, if they communicate poorly, if they’re- you know- obvious punctuation errors or something, then I tend to knock them down a couple of pegs. I don’t know that that’s always correct, I know some very bright people who are very poor writers, but I think we are often judged by the way we put words down on paper. And so if you intend pursue to career in anything and you want to advance and you want to be thought highly of, I think being literate and being able to write is a pretty core element in your career strategy.

Claudia Laycock: Learn to organize. Learn to say it succinctly. A lot of law students come out of law school thinking that we’re still back with Charles Dickens and we should write about the same way that he did, or the lawyers did back then. Cut out the extra verbiage, make it as simple and as short as possible so that it’s clear and easy to read. If you think it sounds like a lawyer, then you’re probably writing really poorly. If it looks and sounds like your next door neighbor who doesn’t know anything about law could read it, then you’ve written very well. And get away from the over use of introductory words like therefore and wherefore and heretofore. There’s a movement that a lot of people are fighting, but the movement is to make legal writing very clean and precise and easy to read.

Terry Olson: I’ve noticed almost a pre-writing chore, a little more recently than in the past. There is something about sentence structure and grammar, and writing in complete sentences that would be an awfully giant step forward. It seems like a small thing, but when somebody is technically disheveled in the way they write, I almost can’t even pay attention to the content, to the substance to be able to say is this a good idea. I get bogged down in the awkwardness, the wandering, the simple lack of spelling, I mean we do have spell checkers but I am not sure that students even do that sometimes. It’s embarrassing, frankly, sometimes to see the simplicity with which some of the mistakes could be corrected.

That is step one, once you are technically correct, then you can worry about how to make… now I have a thesis for this paragraph, and I’ve got to have every sentence support that thesis statement. All that is very good, but it comes after you have solved the mechanics problems of grammar and complete sentences and all that.

Claudia Laycock: One of the major things that I try to do is write not in a passive voice, but in a direct voice. So I avoid things such as “the evidence was presented by the defendant” and instead I say “the defendant said this” and so it’s very direct and the defendant is doing the acting I try to make it very direct with subject verb and then whatever happened after the verb and making it very clear- its more interesting to read and so your audience finds it more interesting and your thoughts are expressed more clearly.

Susan Meyer: I had a great teacher in high school—remember diagramming sentences? Why don't they do that anymore? I mean, nobody knows anything about how sentences are constructed anymore. All you have to do is look at the English on the internet and its like, where did the English go? I thought it was great sport to dissect these huge long sentences with all these subjunctive clauses and stuff and figure out how they were put together.

Claudia Laycock: I always tell my clerks that their first three or four months with me they’re going to spend learning to write like I write, and they’re going to learn the difference between “it’s” with an apostrophe and “its” without an apostrophe and I’m known throughout our fourth judicial district for being picky about writing. When I was a prosecutor the joke with the officers was that I would grade their search warrants. Because I have the reputation for having been a teacher I know they’re all waiting to see a mistake so I’m that much more careful because the attorneys just love to come in holding it in the air saying, “oh judge, we caught something!”

Susan Black: I can’t read student essays, which are like punching a pencil through my head, without editing them. I actually think high school teachers have done students a disfavor by putting a star and 100%--they could have actually taught them to write.

If you are in business, and your grammar is not correct—crazy thing, I went to a surgeon last week, and he had a thing, read all these pages and sign this that “yes you’re willing.” I edited it. I go, you’re smarter than this, I see Phi Kappa Phi on the wall, let’s put your best foot forward! You have to put your best foot forward and one of the ways you do that is writing.

Claudia Laycock: I teach a class once a year for our clerks here in our district. And I have a packet of materials that I work them through and we talk about homonyms like “to”, “too”, and “two” and all kinds of things that they can mess up, because our clerks do writing as well.