Set in Style

From “DEFYING PRECEDENT: THE ARMY WRITING STYLE” authored by Major Thomas Keith Emswiler:

 
Why can’t lawyers, who are among the best educated in any community, write well? Why can’t law professors, who are among the best educated in the legal community, write well? The answer is reliance on precedent — the lawyer’s bread and butter. What law student hasn’t looked at a sentence such as: “Accordingly, substantive equality should be measured by equality in fact; the process must be equal but the results must also reflect the effort to remedy the effects of a century of official discrimination,” and aspired to write in a similar manner? Reliance on precedent leads to poor writing.
 

In our last post, we considered the order of verbs and the adverbs used to modify them. And we considered an easy and reliable way of calculating the colloquial quotient of the order of verbs and adverbs.

Here, we consider something closely related — the myth of the split verb.
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A common error many attorneys make when writing client alerts is this: they use exactly the same style of writing that they use in their daily work.

But that doesn’t work very well. When you write a brief, someone else has to read it. But when you write a client alert, no one has to read it.

If you want your alert to attract an audience, write it so it’s as easy to read as can be. The easier you make it for readers to read what you wrote, the more likely they are to do just that (and recommend what you wrote to others).
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You’ve got a deadline. You’re reviewing your work, and then you realize an important section begins with this*:

A California Court of Appeal recently interpreted the state’s Song-Beverly Credit Act to allow merchants to require extra personal identifying information from customers to be recorded on credit card slips when giving a customer credit for returned merchandise. The statute prohibits retailers from requiring customers to provide extra personal identification information, such as a driver’s license or Social Security Number, on credit card transaction slips, or using slips which have pre-printed spaces for such information.

Once you realize this, what do you do?

A. Read on and realize what comes next?
B. Read it again?
C. Edit it?

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In the past few years, a number of large law firms have named a few partners as editors of practice-area newsletters (and of other publications, like practice-area blogs). And that makes perfect sense because the authors of those newsletters need what all authors need — editors to review their work. But what do these lawyer/editors do?
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