Law Commons^™

Legal Citation Part Iii: Using Citation To Convey Textual Meaning, Jason G. Dykstra, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

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No abstract provided.

Alliteration, Restraint, And A Mind At Work, Patrick Barry

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Alliteration is great—until it’s not. You can pretty quickly overdo it, though I don’t think any major professional sports franchise has yet. The Boston Bruins, the Seattle Seahawks, the Cleveland Cavaliers: these names all have a nice ring to them. As do countless others, from the Washington Wizards to the Tennessee Titans to the Buffalo Bills. The sounds run quickly off your tongue and not unpleasantly into the air. They’re not irritating or obnoxious—unless maybe you’re a fan of the opposing team.

Show And Tell, Patrick Barry

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“Show don’t tell.” Teachers preach these words. Style guides endorse them. And you’d be hard pressed to find any editor or law firm partner who hasn’t offered them as feedback in the last year, month, week, maybe even day. There’s only one problem: “Show don’t tell” is bad advice. Or at least, it is incomplete advice.

Beyond The Basics: Lesser-Used Punctuation Marks, Jason G. Dykstra, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

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No abstract provided.

The Infinite Power Of Grammar, Patrick Barry

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Good lawyers know that effective advocacy requires more than just choosing the right words; it also requires choosing the right word order. The formal term for this choice is “syntax.” But perhaps a better description comes from a 1976 essay by Joan Didion called “Why I Write.”

In it, Didion draws a helpful parallel between the arrangement of a photograph and the arrangement of a sentence. “To shift the structure of a sentence,” she notes, “alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of the camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.” Didion refers …