Links to Other Web Pages With Guidance About Legal Writing
- The Ultimate
Legal Writing Tip: Know Your Audience.
-
A Modest Wish for Legal Writing.
- Writing Clear and Effective Legal Prose: Lesson 1.
- Writing Clear and Effective Legal Prose: Lesson 2.
- Writing Clear and Effective Legal Prose: Lesson 3. This
contains an excellent discussion of occasions when the passive voice is good to
use.
- Shall v. Will.
- On Legal Writing: Write Like Hemingway, not Faulkner.
- Legalese v. Plain
English.
- Writing
Tips from a Judge.
- Plain Language Legal Writing, by Cheryl
Stephens.
- Empirical Study Shows That the
Public Prefers Plain Legal Writing. This link takes you to the abstract for this report, but you
can see the entire report by clicking on the download button on this site.
- Even Judges Prefer Plain
Language to Legalese.
-
Lawyers and Proper Semicolon Use.
-
More on Legal Writing.
-
Drafting Legal Documents, published by the U.S. Archives and Records Administration.
- Legislative Counsel’s
Manual of Drafting Style, U.S. House of Representatives.
- Drafting Legislation at the U.S. House of
Representatives.
- Federal Digital System (for accessing U.S.
Government documents on line).
- Drafting Contracts, by Tina Stark.
- Negotiating and Drafting
Contract Boilerplate, by Tina Stark. “You will learn more about contracts by reading
this book than you ever learned in a law-school contracts class.”—John Hightower.
- Interviews with U.S. Supreme Court
Justices and Other Judges about Legal Writing.
- Manual of Style for Contract Drafting, by Ken Adams.
- Typography for Lawyers. Although this
site is primarily directed toward lawyers, the principles advocated apply to anyone “setting
type”; that is, anyone who is using a modern word-processing program and computer printer
to produce a document.
- Slashing Verbosity from Legal
Writing.
- Are In-House
Lawyers Abysmal Writers? The problem may not be limited to the in-house lawyers, but may
be typical of lawyers in general.
-
Redundancies in Legal Writing.
- Causes of Poor Legal Writing.
- Instruction
Manual and Drafting Style Manual, Alabama Legislative Reference Service.
- Don't
Write Like a Lawyer.
- Contract
Readability.
- Law and Linguistics.
- Plain Language for Lawyers.
- Poor Legal Writing in Brief Causes Problem for Attorney.
Return to links page.
