Set in Style

Yesterday, the House passed the Plain Language in Government Communications Act of 2008 by a vote of 376 to 1. The act requires government agencies to use plain language in “Government* documents intended for the public.” The act is also meant to “preserve and enhance the role of English.”

To comply, government agencies may rely on the Plain English Handbook, published by the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the Federal Plain Language Guidelines.

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*Curious it is that, in such a bill, government is set as Government.

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Related News:

This article (published today) describes the massive effort underway at the Veterans Affairs Department to rewrite regulations in plain language.

And this proposal from the SEC would require investment advisers to provide their clients with brochures written in plain English.

Thanks to the Legal Writing Prof Blog for mentioning this article about how law firms are using legal writing instructors to support and train their lawyers.

Let’s see, if lawyers need help with the sort of writing they studied in law school and do every day, then they could well need help with the sort of writing they never studied and do on occasion, and that’s promotional writing: client alerts, magazine articles, blog posts, etc.

And if you don’t think client alerts and magazine articles and blog posts are promotional, then consider this: why do you suppose lawyers take the time to write such things?

The GC for a high tech firm is looking for counsel familiar with this or that. He asks around and he hears about you. Before he takes the time to call you, he asks an associate to do some research.

What does the associate do? The first thing she does is review your firm’s Web site. She looks at your bio, and then she clicks a link to some article you wrote. What she sees after she clicks that link is going to influence her report to the GC.

Suppose she clicks this link and finds a PDF version of a not-so-legible photocopy of an article you wrote. The impression she gets is that your firm is hardly high tech. That impression is reinforced when she realizes the article could have been reprinted with this level of legibility.

Suppose she clicks this link. She’s a mite perplexed because she can’t figure out what sort of file it is. She does some tinkering and finds it’s a PDF version of a not-so-legible photocopy of an article that could have been reprinted with this level of legibility.

Suppose she clicks this link. She already knows that your firm doesn’t identify PDFs as PDFs, so she opens the file in Acrobat. Once again, she finds a not-so-legible photocopy of an article that could have been reprinted with this level of legibility.

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Sometimes it doesn’t matter how good or bad your article is. The impression people get isn’t always from what you wrote, but from what your firm produced. If your firm does a lousy job of reprinting articles you wrote, it makes you look bad. It gives the impression that you’re all-too-capable of missing what’s obvious.

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Let’s look at one more example of a firm that doesn’t much care what sort of impression its publications make on prospective clients. Click this link, and you’ll discover a firm that publishes photocopies, rather than originals, of its own newsletters!

The Blog of Legal Times informs us that Antonin Scalia is going to be interviewed by Leslie Stahl on the 27 April episode of 60 Minutes. Seems as if the camera-shy justice is making an appearance to promote his upcoming book (co-authored by Bryan Garner) Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges.

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Update: The Washington Post has this article about Scalia’s newfound lack of shyness. The the ABA Journal has this interview with Bryan Garner and Antonin Scalia.

Just in from the AP (announcing the 2008 Pulitzer Prize winners):

BIOGRAPHY: “Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father,” by John Matteson

Matteson said his 14-year-old daughter was an inspiration for his book, which is about a girl’s relationship with her father. “Not only did I understand parenting better after writing the book, but being a parent helped me to write the book,” Matteson said.

Matteson, who holds a doctorate in English from Columbia University and a law degree from Harvard, teaches literature and legal writing as an associate professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He has practiced law in California and North Carolina.

Matteson said his daughter wants to become a writer and he couldn’t wait for her to get out of school to tell her the news.

Here’s the intro to the book.

There was some noise this week about a revision to an Arkansas law (9-11-102(b)(1)), passed last March, that — on its face — allowed children of any age to get a marriage license, just so long as they had their parents’ permission. The law contained the following:

In order for a person who is younger than eighteen (18) years of age and who is not pregnant to obtain a marriage license, the person must provide the county clerk with evidence of parental consent to the marriage.

What the author of the bill intended was a law prohibiting people younger than 18 from getting married in Arkansas, with an exception for pregnant girls. They could get married if their parents consented. Somehow (and no one seems to know how it happened) the phrase “who is pregnant” was changed to “who is not pregnant.”

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Kudos to Greg May (host of The California Blog of Appeal) for informing us of this award given to Justice Arthur Gilbert, “The California Court of Appeal’s poet laureate.”

In addition to making sure that the articles a firm publishes are free from spelling and grammatical errors, an editor can help make sure those articles are free from factual errors.

Let’s look at a few real-world examples: several articles describing the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in LaRue v. DeWolff, Boberg & Associates, Inc.
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If legal writing is your passion, then you need treatment. Just kidding.

Seriously, if it’s your passion, then you can wear it on your sleeve, or on your head or your back or your butt, or you can stick it on your refrigerator or your window, or you can sip from it or cook with it on. You can walk around campus and cause others to wonder about you. You can make Englicians envious. You can splurge and make your legal writing prof proud.

Interested? Check out the legal writing merchandise at Cafe Press.

In this interview published by Management Consulting News, Tom Sant, author of The Language of Success, describes a writing style he calls Guff:

Guff is another form of pseudo language. This is the mode people use when they want to convince us that they are more intelligent [. . .] than we are. Guff is the language you get from many bureaucrats, senior managers, lawyers, and politicians. It showcases big words, long sentences, lots of passive voice, and convoluted constructions. At the end of it, you don’t know what they’ve said.

Of course, Guff is required for most (but not all) legal writing. But it’s not required for most promotional pieces (e.g., client alerts) written by attorneys.

If you’re an attorney, and you’re used to writing Guff day-in/day-out, then pause before you write your next client alert. Take a moment to think of your audience, and ask yourself: do I want an itsy-bitsy audience (e.g., corporate counselors interested in Rule 204-3), or do I want a much larger audience?If you want the larger audience, forget the Guff.

And, if you feel compelled to write about Rule 204-3, don’t waste your time writing what so many others have already written. After all, who’s going to read the umpteenth analysis of proposed amendments to Form ADV?