By Chinua Asuzu
Language and writing dominate lawyers’ professional lives. Reading and writing are almost all we do.
“Teachers teach, chefs cook, and lawyers write.” Gerald Lebovits, ‘How to Succeed in Legal Writing by Really Trying,’ 90 New York State Bar Association Journal (No. 7, Sept 2018), 61, 63.
Hence, Douglas Abrams characterizes law as a literary profession: “Law is a literary profession. Briefs, motion papers, and transactional documents dominate client representation; judges speak through written opinions; and lawyers draft legislation, administrative regulations, and other government documents.” Douglas E. Abrams, ‘The Right to a Reader,’ The Precedent (Winter 2007), 38.
William L. Prosser calls law “one of the principal literary professions,” adding, “One might hazard the supposition that the average lawyer in the course of a lifetime does more writing than a novelist.” William L. Prosser, ‘English as She is Wrote,’ 7 Journal of Legal Education (1954), 155, 156.
Writing is a lifelong discipline in the life of a lawyer.
Chinua Asuzu, Learned Writing (Partridge, 2016), 26.
“Good writing is built on empathy—an ability to see words as a reader will and to write and rewrite until the words satisfy the reader’s needs and cause the reader to feel gratitude at having been helped.” Richard K. Neumann Jr, ‘Why Congress Drafts Gibberish,’ 16 Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors (2019), 111, 128.
“Good legal writers consider the reader when constructing paragraphs, drafting sentences, and choosing words. No reader wants to see a wall of text—with a paragraph spanning more than a page. And no reader wants to start reading a sentence without being able to see the end of it. Long sentences read to run-ons, subject–verb disagreement, and confusion.” Jill Barton, ‘So Ordered: The Techniques of Great Judicial Stylists,’ 18 Scribes Journal of Legal Writing (2018), 9.
