Today’s Quote
Ross Guberman offers Ten Resolutions for the New Year, each meant to improve an attorney’s brief-writing skills. Here’s one :
7. Each sentence contains the fewest number of words needed to make the point.
That’s good advice, and so is this corollary:
When you edit a brief, replace a longer phrase with a shorter one, if you can.
When you’re done, compare how many words the brief contained before the edit, to after.
Suppose a good edit allowed you (effectively) to add two more pages to the brief. Wouldn’t that be a nice advantage?
