This is my 60th column on legal
writing. The articles have covered a lot of ground.
But the fight goes on.
After attending
my seminar in New Orleans, Louisiana workers'
compensation judge Elizabeth Warren sent me a filing,
from which I extracted this gem of a paragraph. I've
disguised it to protect the guilty. It's
a response to a motion, so I'll just call it a filing.
One sentence
"Should
the Court determine that a hearing is necessary, the
Government requests leave to supplement its' filing
with a factual chronology of the defendant's own
admissions of guilt in debriefings with the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, the defendant's
uncorroborated allegations of wrongdoing by others,
the defendant's attempts to dissuade the government
from prosecuting him through a series of threats
relayed by him and others on his behalf about the
damaging fallout that a prosecution against him would
incur and the steps taken by the U.S. Attorney's
Office to insure that if and when such a motion was
filed as the one pending, we would be able to pinpoint
with certainty the steps taken to insure an
independent analysis of any legal relevance
[Defendant's] allegations had to this or any other
prosecution undertaken by this office."
Where to start?
The problems with
this example are numerous:
Never use Courier
type. It is difficult to read and connotes a 1940
Underwood. One of many reasons is that Courier is a
monospaced type, which makes justification
problematic. Using Courier
marks you as a rube.
The sentence
is 135 words long. The limit is 40, and average should
be 18.
The passage
tests at the 57th grade, meaning that to understand it
the first time, you must have completed 57 years of
formal schooling. Do you know anyone who has been to
the 57th grade?
The
readability score on a 100-point scale is 0.
There is no
such word as its'. The desired word is its. And it's
no typo it's used again later.
The proper
word is ensured, not insured.
Almost every
conceivable error
Things get worse.
The next page has this in the middle of a paragraph:
See
United States v. Bolden, 353 F.3d 870, 875-876
(10th Cir. 2003); see also In Re
Harris County, Texas, 240 Fed. Appx. 644,645-646
(5th Cir. 2007).
This has even
more problems:
Instead of
italics, the filing uses underlining. Underling is a
signal to the typesetter (formerly an actual person)
to use italics. We had to use underlining with
typewriters, but now our word processors do italics
quite nicely.
The jumble of
letters and numbers is in the body, making the
paragraphs difficult to read.
The
punctuation of the cites is also messed up, but we
won't quibble about that.
This sentence
shows another flaw:
The
[Plaintiff] opposes this motion because the relief
requested disqualifying
an entire government officeis
not available.
The author
evidently thinks that em dashes () and hyphens (-)
are interchangeable. We can now easily do proper em
dasheswe had to use two hyphens on typewriters. I
assume this person was using a word processor. But
even on a typewriter, just one hyphen for a dash was
never acceptable.
Never use talking
footnotes, as they are impossible to read. You should
also avoid block quotes, because the reader will
simply skip them.
Another
bewildering paragraph
"Nonetheless,
now obligated to respond to [Defendant's] shell of a
vehicle giving expression to his unsupported vitriol
against his accusers and victims, the [Plaintiff] also
is compelled to indicate tersely that [Defendant's]
related allegation of suppressed evidence is untrue.
Fortunately, [Defendant's] mendacity with the
facts is as disprovable as his mendacity with the law.
And the mendacity was predictable. As
soon as [Defendant] littered his own admissions of
considerable fraudulent criminal activities in his
practice as a lawyer with false and unsupported
impugns of others - and sought specifically to connect
his aspersions to other persons [Defendant] might
think would invite the government to consider leniency
for him, above all, to other pending and past public
figure prosecutions - this Office, unknown to
[Defendant], took precisely the safeguarding action
[Defendant] wrongly guesses and contends with sinister
implication did not occur."
Here are the
problems:
This
paragraph, with an average of 34 words per sentence,
checks out at the 21st grade.
The writer
does start a sentence with an and, so he gets credit
for that. But it's not enough to save the paragraph,
which has a readability of 9 on a 100-point scale.
I've never
seen "impugns" used as a noun. And
neither has the dictionary.
Tersely seems
misused.
It too uses a
hyphen for an em dash.
The last
sentence is 79 words and unfathomable.
As I've said
before, when writing about bad legal writing, you are
never at a loss for a bad example advance sheets
come every week. But this document had so many typical
errors that it was a particularly fitting example.
Readability
I always show the
readability levels for the column. They are (my
writing only) 11 words per sentence, 5% passive voice,
and grade level 6.7.
