Set in Style

The good folks behind Mission Critical Litigation^® claim that their leaders were formed — and they were formed in just one day. Here’s the claim:

Formed on March 1, 1980, our leaders built a firm with ambitious and smart lawyers who demonstrate passion and zeal in their representation of the firm’s clients.

What they didn’t do was exercise the standard of care expected of a publisher* — they didn’t involve an editor.

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* If you publish articles and newsletters and client alerts and practice-area descriptions and you maintain a Web site, then you are a publisher.

And if you claim to pay great attention to detail, . . . .

Ross Guberman has this interesting post about the grammatical errors he found in the opinion and dissents in District of Columbia vs. Heller.

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Update: On 14 July, the California Supreme Court announced that it is looking for an editor.

Each of the following contains some grammatical error(s). Can you identify the error(s)?

McKee Nelson has one of the most prominent teams of tax attorneys in the country, comprised of accomplished business lawyers with tax expertise who represent a diverse range of clients.

McKee Nelson’s Litigation/Enforcement Group is comprised of more than 60 lawyers with extensive experience representing clients with regard to complex disputes . . . .

Because the tax credits and other tax benefits often comprise a significant portion of the economic return . . . .

Be the first to correctly identify the error(s), and win a nifty prize — one that sets you apart from most others.

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Note: Not long after our winner won this contest, the folks at McKee Nelson revised their copy — they replaced comprise with compose. In their haste, they introduced another error!

Professional publishers do this: before they publish copy, they prove proof it.

This is a pretty straightforward task. It’s the sort of thing most concientious conscientious sots sorts learned in middle school (i.e., before you submit a paper, review it).

It’s a very basic, and important, taks task. Forget to proof your copy before it’s published, and you just might find people talking about you (in a not-so-good way) the next day.

Now that we’re clear on that, let’s talk about SEO: search engine optimization.
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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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This anonymously authored Note in the Harvard Law Review has gotten lots of attention recently.

Here’s a bit of it:

Now, suppose Ms. Anonymous went over to The Writing Center and asked for some help. What would have happened to the above?

It might have turned out like so:

Less wordy; less convoluted; more pleasing to readers, and the author seems like a fairly good writer. 

If you’re like most, you just can’t function as your own editor. 

It’s like trying to cut your own hair.