Finished Files

One of my students this semester, Bill Ward, sent me this interesting brain-teaser.

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS
OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE
EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

Count the Fs in that sentence ONCE and ONLY ONCE.  How many Fs does the sentence contain? 

The answer can be found here

This little quiz is a reminder of how difficult proofreading can be.  When we are tired or lack focus, our brains don't always proofread accurately.  "Is" looks like "in" and "it," and "on" looks like "of" and "or." 

I am a fan of proofspeaking.  As silly as its sounds, one of the best ways I have found to catch typos and odd-sounding sentences is to read your document out loud, slowly, sounding out every word.  Try it sometime and see if your errors don't jump off the page.    

Happy St. Paddy's Day!

In honor of St. Patrick's Day, I've composed a Lady (Legal) Writer limerick:

She loved legal writing the best
To teach all its importance was her quest
So she started a blog
To help those in a fog
And hoped she didn't bore all the rest

Commas Save Lives

Earlier this week, one of my students sent me the link for this great t-shirt.

As many of you know, my practice is primarily focused on insurance coverage and bad faith defense work.  In that type of work, the existence or lack of a comma can mean the difference between no coverage and $1 million in coverage.  I think commas are important, to say the least.  Others apparently agree with me.

The shirt can be found here.

An Accolade for Lady (Legal) Writer

I was perusing the Legal Writing Prof Blog today at lunch when I saw a link to a post on Legal Productivity about top legal writing blogs.  I’m always interested in new blogs and websites about legal writing, so I clicked on the link.  Imagine my surprise when Lady (Legal) Writer was listed at #9! (The exclamation point is 100% acceptable here, just not in formal legal writing.)

The link to the Legal Productivity post is here.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed keeping this blog, even when I’ve been the only one to view my posts.  I hope you enjoy it as well and will continue to visit on a regular basis.  I try to make at least one post per week.  If you ever have topics you’d like to see covered here, or questions or comments about a post, please do not hesitate send me an email and let me know.

Yay Clarence Thomas

I just came across this interesting article in The Atlantic about Clarence Thomas's philosophy on judicial opinion writing.  While I know we can't all agree on the correctness of Justice Thomas's decisions, I think we all can get behind shorter, clearer opinions.

Why Clarence Thomas Uses Simple Words in His Opinions

Some Typos are Worse than Others

Exhibit A--Misspelling your own name.  Poor Missouri State.  Unfortunately, typos can happen to all of us.  This is another reminder about the importance of proofreading and spell-checking.

http://news.yahoo.com/oops-university-misspells-own-name-70k-worth-canvas-153200695.html

Mind Your Ps (Pronouns, That Is)

Smith struck Jones, injuring his hand.

Did Smith injure Jones’s hand, or did Smith injure his own hand?

Legal writers often overuse pronouns, leading to confusion.   As I’ve said previously, the legal writer’s overall goal should be to make sentences as clear as possible.  Writers who aren’t careful about pronoun use produce unclear sentences.  This lack of clarity often occurs because the pronoun is too far away from the antecedent, or because the writer includes multiple persons or things to which the pronoun might refer.  For example,

The defendant told the judge he was sorry.  He then sat down. 

Did the defendant say “I’m sorry,” or did the defendant tell the judge, “You’re sorry.”  Who sat down?  The judge? The defendant?  You can easily correct ambiguous pronoun use.  In the first example, change “his,” or re-word.

The defendant struck the plaintiff, injuring the plaintiff’s hand.

The defendant injured the plaintiff’s hand when he struck the plaintiff.

There is a similar remedy for the second example:

The defendant said, “I’m sorry,” and then sat down.

The defendant told the judge the defendant was sorry.  The defendant then sat down.

Strive for clarity, even if changing a pronoun makes a sentence slightly more bulky.