Set in Style

I’m reading this speech (delivered at the Legal Writing Institute conference in Seattle) written by George Gopen (Senior Lecturing Fellow at Duke University Law School) when I run across this:

“Writing is thinking; thinking is writing. If you can get better at one, you can get better at the other. In order to get better at one, you must get better at the other. And it doesn’t matter with which you begin.”

Interesting, methinks. But do I agree?

My first impression is positive, because the first line is catchy, and the next three lines are encouraging. The whole graph is set in style, and I like that.

But do I agree?

It turns out I don’t. Or maybe I do, but I find exceptions:

I’m in the grocery store, and I’m short on funds. So I compare the price of this can to the price of that can to figure which can to buy. I’m thinking, but I’m nowhere near writing.

I’m staring out a window wondering how I’m going to explain Long Polynomial Division to a class of first-year students. It occurs to me that I could compare division of Arabic numerals to division of Roman numerals to explain both the concept and the procedure. Once again, I’m thinking, but I’m not writing.

I’m headed towards a meeting with an attorney, or the marketing director of a law firm, and I’m polishing my presentation. I’m figure the order of things, and their relative importance. I’m thinking, but I’m not writing.

Seems to me, you need to think to write, but you don’t need to write to think.

Perhaps Mr. Gopen was speaking of nothing beyond legal writing and reasoning. In that case, perhaps he’s right. If he is, and if you’re an attorney who can’t write well, then you’d better work on your writing.

If you don’t have time for that at this point in your career (i.e., you’re no longer a young associate), then you might want to work with an editor: someone who can make you appear as a much better writer and — hence — create the impression that you’re a much better thinker than your writing suggests.

____________
From the same article, something to ponder:

On the sentence level, there are five essential questions a reader must be able to answer in order to understand not simply “what information was in the sentence,” but rather how to forge that information into the thought that the writer wished to communicate. Here are the five questions:
(1) What is going on?
(2) Whose story is this?
(3) How does this sentence link backward to the one that I’ve just finished reading?
(4) How does the sentence lean forward to what might come next? And, most importantly;
(5) What in the sentence is most deserving of my readerly emphasis?

If almost all readers of a particular sentence agreed on the answers to these questions — and those answers are the ones the writer wanted them to perceive — then we would have to agree this particular sentence “was well written.”

This entry was posted 2 February 2008 at 20:09 and is filed under General. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.