Set in Style

This article, written by Steve Blumenthal, an attorney for Dow Lohnes, provides a good example of why attorneys need editors (especially when they write articles for publication).

It’s a pretty good article, and it appears right where it should: in Broadcasting & Cable, a magazine that’s read by many of Blumenthal’s potential clients. But it makes the author look like he’s not very knowledgeable.

Here’s the intro to Blumenthal’s article:

I recently gave a client an updated set of guidelines for running car commercials on its television stations. The guidelines recited the usual litany of disclosures required by the Truth in Lending Act, the Consumer Leasing Act, Federal Trade Commission regulations and state law. (You know the drill: If you say nothing, you don’t have to disclose anything, but the minute you say anything, you must disclose everything.) My client half-heartedly thanked me for the guidelines like an eight year-old thanks an aunt for the school clothes she gives him as a birthday gift. Then he asked me a question that struck me as both obvious and difficult to answer: How long do the disclosures need to stay on the screen?

Federal law, I replied, requires that disclosures in advertisements be “clear and conspicuous,” but doesn’t mandate any particular manner of presentation of the disclosures. I gathered from my client’s silence that he wasn’t satisfied with my answer, so I offered to look into the issue further.

FTC commentary, I found, doesn’t offer much more guidance. Disclosures must be “reasonably understandable,” says the FTC. “Very fine print” and “very rapidly stated” information don’t pass muster. A consumer must be able to read or hear, and comprehend, the information required to be disclosed.

Blumenthal goes on to explain how he researched the law. He comes off as not very knowledgeable. A customer asked him a simple question, and Blumenthal had to hit the books to find an answer.

An editor would have made Blumenthal appear much more knowledgeable.

Here’s an interesting op-ed in the New York Times (yet another written by a lawyer).

Titled “Clause and Effect,” it discusses the controversy regarding the commas in the Second Amendment.

The Legal Writing Prof Blog has this post about a new article: Readability Studies: How Technocentrism Can Compromise Research an [sic] Legal Determinations, 26 Quinnipiac Law Review 147 (2007).

According to the post, it’s about readability formulas, and the accuracy of the formulas provided in Microsoft Word:

“If Microsoft’s readability program is flawed, however, it compromises the results of the many researchers who have relied on it.”

We don’t question the accuracy of some things. If Word says a document contains 600 words, then that’s what it contains, right? And it’s easy enough to check.

But what about the accuracy of some other features of Word? If you’re familiar with its spelling- and grammar-check feature, you must know it’s not always spot on. It often misses obvious errors, and it often reports problems that don’t exist.

What about Word’s readability feature? Is it accurate?

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How often do you check a document’s readability scores? Do you ever make changes to a document to affect those scores?

If you’re writing a client alert or an article for one your firm’s newsletters, you certainly should.

If you want people to read what you’ve written, keep an eye on readability, especially the introduction to the article.

Why? Because readers often decide not to read past the first paragraph if that one’s hard to read.

And there’s not much sense in writing articles that people aren’t going to read.

Here’s an interesting story (from several months ago) about a virtual law firm in Second Life.

Here’s another story (from last month) about another virtual firm.

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I wonder, could Second Life (or something similar) become a great place to test business development ideas?

What can an editor do for a law firm?

Consider the intro to this newsletter published by a law firm that specializes in employment law:

A popular, and altruistic, employee benefit some employers provide is a leave-sharing program. An employer-sponsored leave-sharing program allows an employee to donate accrued hours of paid vacation, or personal and potentially sick leave for the benefit of other employees who are in need of taking more leave than they have available.

What’s wrong with this intro? There’s that very curious phrase: potentially sick leave. A comma is missing (right after the curious phrase). The careful reader can wonder how leave-sharing programs are so popular if they’re only offered by some employers, and every reader can wonder how a benefit can be altruistic.

What might a skilled and experienced editor do with this? Given the freedom to do a heavy edit (which is needed here), an editor could transform that intro into this:

More and more employers are offering leave-sharing programs to their employees. These programs allow employees to donate earned vacation time, as well as personal and sick days, for use by other employees who need more leave than they have earned.

Let’s consider the changes and the reasons for them.

1. The edited version contains 20% fewer words than the unedited version. (Why write who are in need of taking more leave when you could write who need more leave?)
2. The edited version is more readable than the unedited version. The edited version scores 55.4 on the Flesch Reading Ease scale; the unedited version scores 23.3.
3. The edited version is properly punctuated.
4. The edited version doesn’t claim that benefits (rather than the employers who provide them) can be altruistic.
5. That curious phrase (potentially sick leave) is gone.

That’s a good example of what an editor can do for a law firm: improve the quality of its publications.

A few weeks ago, a friendly reader asked:

What’s up with the new tendency to hypenate all modifiers, including (and especially irritating) the hypen-forbidden ”ly” words (e.g. family-friendly policy = WRONG)  The lawyers and marketers definitely need a little schooling on this!

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Consider this intro to a blog post written by a well-known professor of economics:

The growth of large government managed funds during the past few years has been spectacular.

Can you spot the problem with this sentence?

(more…)

Imagine this! You’re in Indiana, and you’re mistakenly charged with some serious crime.

Even after the authorities realize someone else committed the crime, you’re prosecuted anyway (because the indictment against you may not be dismissed):

Update: For all those who don’t get it, the statute says that an indictment may not (ever, ever) be dismissed (for any reason). Yes! Yes! I know that that’s not what the legislature meant to say, but that’s what it did say. The difference between what the legislature meant to say and what it said amounts to this: two missing commas.

The point here isn’t that this piece of legislation is so exceptional. It’s not. State legislatures do this sort of thing all the time. And that’s why they should have an editor (or an 8th-grade English teacher) review legislation before it’s published.

If we expect 8th-graders to know how to use commas to set off dependent clauses (and when to use which and when to use that), then we can demand that our legislators know that as well. Right?

Consider the following snippet from this recently published Intellectual Property Update:

Notice the spacing between the words in the next-to-last line.

Now, grab a newspaper, or a magazine, or a book: anything published by a professional publishing company. Scan the right-hand side of a column of fully justified type. Notice that hyphens are used to break some lines. This eliminates giant gaps between words (which tends to annoy readers).

If the firm that published the Intellectual Property Update relied on a production editor to produce the update, the above snippet would have been set like so:

A big deal? No. Just another detail. And a convenience for readers.

The Web sites for these firms/attorneys have something in common:

Betts Law Offices

Christopher Bebel. Esq.

Bronstein Gewirtz & Grossman

Sonn & Erez

Jenice Malecki, Esq.

They all contain content belonging to FindLaw. Some of them identify FindLaw as the owner, and some don’t. But they all claim that they own the content.

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Word has it that these FindLaw sites cost $2,000 per month to maintain.

Here’s a firm that has a philosophy AND a conference room, but the focus is on the latter.