Product Description
This uncommonly unsentimental volume demystifies authorised writing, outlines the causes as well as consequences of bad writing, as well as prescribes straightforward, easy-to-apply remedies which will have your essay readable. Complete with use records which residence lawyers’ many usual errors, this well-organized book is both an useful apparatus for putting in service lawyers as well as the essential education for law students. This much-revised second book contains the set of modifying exercises (and the referred to rider pass with explanations) to exam your skill. This book is the decisive beam to apropos the improved writer–and the improved lawyer…. More >>
The Lawyer’s Guide to Writing Well, Second Edition
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5 Comments
Goldstein and Lieberman have authored a book every law professional and law student should consult. The glossary alone has enough helpful hints to improve one’s writing.
i first purchased this “intriguing” book when living in chicago where i worked as “foreign patent specialist” and “senior tech writer/editor”. When we moved to Las Vegas, after my retirement, I panicked when I realized that I’ve lost this book. Just open any page and savor the words in this book. Bravo to the authors. I wish I could shake their hands for a well-written and intriguing book.
This is an excellent work for lawyers wishing to improve the clarity, continuity, and power of their prose. It is easy to understand, and full of examples. This work illustrates what a judge-professor once taught me: “There is no such thing as good legal writing. There is only good writing.”
How good is this book? Well, I’ve put it on my shelf right between Bryan Garner’s masterwork The Winning Brief and Steven Stark’s famous and succinct Writing To Win. Like both of those books, Professors Goldstein and Liberman present a systemic approach to legal writing. They are brave enough to offer real-life legal writing duds as well as writing gems from practicing lawyers as well as judges. Only professors could do that. If a lawyer tried it, it would be professional harikari.
Their advice is more general than Garner’s and more detailed than Stark’s. In that vein, the book is a good middle-of-the-road guide for lawyers. Frankly, I was skeptical of a book written for lawyers by two professors. I thought they’d be throwing stones from their ivory towers at the litigators in the trenches. They do, but not so much we can’t handle it. More importantly, their advice is mostly on the mark.
That doesn’t mean they don’t stray a bit from time to time. They spend the first agonizing 34 pages telling us over and over again how legal writing has been atrocious for centuries apparently never to change. So why should we bother with this book? And at one point they proclaim that lawyers too often are careless about punctuation. Poppycock, I say. In my experience, many lawyers obsess over typos and punctuation and completely forget to breathe any life into their arguments.
But those are minor flaws in a very good writing guide. If you know a lawyer, chances are this would make a great gift. Too bad I already have it…
Are lawyers professional writers? Could a law office benefit by adopting some methods of a book publisher or newspaper office?
Yes and yes, according to the authors of this excellent book.
The writing advice is superb, from commas to sentence length and from transitions to editing methods. But the best parts of the book are the suggestions for managing a law office so that it will produce consistent, top-notch written work. The authors recommend using proofreaders, training junior lawyers in editing, and employing someone in the position of copy editor. All great advice that would improve legal writing.