With expanded coverage in this new edition, The Elements of Legal Style features additional sections, many more examples, and a thoroughly researched appendix that contains 80 major statements on prose style--what it is and how to attain it. Inspired by Strunk and White's The Elements ofStyle, this book clearly (often wittily) explains the full range of what legal writers need to know: mechanics, word choice, structure, and rhetoric, as well as all the special conventions that legal writers should follow in using headings, defined terms, quotations, and many other devices. Garneralso provides abundant examples from the best legal writers of yesterday and today, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Clarence Darrow, Frank Easterbrook, and Antonin Scalia. If you want to make your writing clearer, more precise, more persuasive, and above all more stylish, The Elements of Legal Style offers the surest--and the most enjoyable--means to that end.

Bryan A. Garner is a best-selling legal author with more than a dozen titles to his credit, including A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, The Winning Brief, A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, and Legal Writing in Plain English. He is also the editor in chief of Black's Law Dictionary in all its current editions.

Acknowledgments

xiii

Foreword

xv

The Letters of the Law

1

(14)

Fundamental Rules of Usage

15

(38)

Punctuation

15

(1)

Always use the serial comma

15

(1)

Set off a dependent introductory phrase with a comma

16

(1)

Put a comma between two adjectives that modify a noun similarly

17

(1)

Put a comma before the second clause in a compound sentence

18

(1)

Avoid using a comma to combine two sentences into one

18

(2)

Form singular possessives by adding's to the singular form of the noun

20

(1)

Form a plural possessive by adding an apostrophe to the plural form of the noun:-s'

20

(1)

Use a semicolon to separate sentence parts calling for a stronger break than a comma

21

(2)

Set off incidental comments with paired marks of punctuation

23

(1)

Hyphenate phrasal adjectives

24

(2)

Otherwise, be stingy with hyphens

26

(2)

Slash out virgules (/)

28

(2)

Word Choice

29

(1)

Strike out and replace fancy words

30

(1)

Challenge vague words

31

(1)

Shun vogue words

32

(1)

Eschew euphemisms

33

(2)

Toss out timid phrases

35

(1)

Discard empty dogmatisms

35

(1)

Be cautious about using neologisms

36

(1)

Tune the levels of usage with a fine ear

37

(3)

Grammar and Syntax

40

(1)

Use the active voice

40

(1)

Put pronouns in their proper case and number

41

(3)

Make the verb agree in number with its subject

44

(1)

Anchor modifiers to what they modify

45

(3)

Split infinitives warily, if at all

48

(1)

Don't be afraid to begin a sentence with And or But

49

(1)

End sentences with prepositions when you need to

50

(1)

Use conditional sentences instead of provisos

51

(2)

Fundamental Principles of Legal Writing

53

(22)

Brevity and Clarity

53

(4)

Simplicity of Structure

57

(1)

Organizing Arguments

58

(4)

Constructing Paragraphs

62

(4)

Constructing Sentences

66

(9)

Some Matters of Form

75

(24)

Titles

75

(2)

Headings

77

(1)

Italics

78

(1)

Numbers

79

(1)

Defined Terms

80

(1)

Contractions

81

(1)

First Person

82

(1)

Enumerations

83

(1)

Quotations

84

(2)

Alterations and Ellipses

86

(3)

Citations

89

(3)

Footnotes

92

(2)

Forms of Address and Reference

94

(3)

Signing Off

97

(2)

Words and Expressions Confused and Misused

99

(50)

Rhetorical Figures in Law

149

(28)

Comparison

150

(1)

Metaphor

150

(1)

Personification

151

(2)

Simile

153

(1)

Wordplay

154

(1)

Hyperbole

154

(1)

Irony

155

(2)

Meiosis

157

(1)

Paronomasia

157

(3)

Syntactic Arrangement

160

(1)

Anastrophe

160

(1)

Antithesis

160

(2)

Asyndeton

162

(1)

Climax

162

(1)

Parallelism

163

(1)

Periodic Sentence

164

(2)

Rhetorical Question

166

(2)

Repetition

168

(1)

Alliteration

168

(1)

Anadiplosis

168

(1)

Anaphora

169

(1)

Antanaclasis

170

(1)

Chiasmus

171

(1)

Epanalepsis

172

(1)

Epistrophe

173

(1)

Epizeuxis

173

(1)

Pleonasm

174

(1)

Polysyndeton

174

(3)

Conclusion

176

(1)

An Approach to Legal Style

177

(44)

Being Yourself

177

(1)

Develop your own plain voice

177

(1)

When appropriate, invest your writing with some honest feeling

178

(1)

Establish your tone and stick to it

179

(2)

Exposition and Argument

181

(1)

Assume an audience of well-informed generalists

181

(2)

Sharpen your reasoning by summarizing your analysis up front, with just the amount of particularity that a generalist would need

183

(5)

Take pains to be thorough, and then distill the essence. Get to the point

188

(3)

Speaking Legally

191

(1)

Avoid jargon and beware terms of art

191

(2)

Write in English

193

(2)

Instead of using doublets or triplets, use a single word

195

(2)

Understate rather than overstate

197

(1)

Expressive Tactics

198

(1)

Put the action into verbs, not nouns and adjectives

198

(2)

Stress nouns and verbs, not qualifiers

200

(1)

Mind the cadence of your prose

201

(2)

Use cliches with caution. And avoid purple prose

203

(4)

Root out sexist language

207

(6)

Forgo commenting on your words

213

(1)

Ban omnibus words

214

(1)

Use one word for one notion

215

(2)

Ferret out ambiguities

217

(1)

Revise, revise, revise

218

(3)

A Parting Word

221

(2)

Appendix Eighty Classic Statements About Style

223

(18)

Index

241

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The Elements of Legal Style

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