Law Commons^™

Typography Matters: Document Design, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

This month, I am turning to what I hope is [a] ... helpful topic: document design. Sit back and enjoy learning more about spaces after periods, cueing devices, point size, justification, and paragraph breaks. [excerpt]

Three Tips For Concise Writing, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

I'm just wrapping up the first unit of my legal writing class. During this time every year, I introduce my students to the 4 C's-four characteristics that should be present in every legal document.' Yes, every legal document should be clear, correct, complete, and concise.

In our class, we emphasize these principles repeatedly. All legal writers should strive to attain the 4 C's. To that end, this month I offer some tips for concision. After all, I don't know anyone who isn't a little too wordy in the first draft.

Let's look at three tips to remove wordiness that I …

Using Quotation Marks Correctly, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Our use of quotation marks should be consistent and take into account reader expectations. We write for American readers, educated in the American style, so we should follow the American rules when using quotation marks. With that in mind, I offer the following tips for correctly using quotation marks in your writing. [excerpt]

Problems With Pronouns Part Iii: Gender-Linked Pronouns, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Recently, a student stopped me in the hall to ask about what to do because English doesn’t have a gender-neutral singular pronoun to refer to people. That reminded me that I hadn’t yet covered all of the pesky pronoun problems in this column. So this month we will continue to discuss problems with pronouns, looking at gender-linked pronouns. [excerpt]

Six Steps To Correct Commas: Achieving Punctuation Peace Of Mind, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

I set out to create a way to prevent my students from cringing when I informed them that they would have to comb over each sentence in their assignments to ensure they had used commas correctly.... The result was six simple steps to correct commas. These steps ensure that your meaning will be clear to the readers the first time they read a sentence and that your sentence will have the commas your educated readers expect. Work through all six simple steps and your readers will be impressed by your mastery of commas, even if you missed the comma class …

The Other Four-Letter Words, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Some struggles in writing come from pesky four-letter words. Not the kind that result from muddy dog prints on the wood floors — the kind that result from not being quite sure of the correct way to use certain words in our writing. So, to celebrate the shortest month of the year, I thought we could learn about some short, four-letter words that tend to give us fits: that, they, whom, data, and none. [excerpt]

Time Savings: E-Editing Tricks And Tips, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

My students have tired of paper editing tricks like reading backwards (so you can concentrate on the words instead of the flow) or out loud. This time, I’m going to work with them on e-editing. I thought many of The Advocate’s readers might also enjoy these tips. So here goes. This month, we will cover ways to prevent mistakes, ways to fix mistakes, and why e-edit isn’t a cure-all. [excerpt]

Writing For E-Readers: Tips And Tricks To Craft Effective Briefs, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

With the second wave of counties in Idaho ready for e-filing, it seemed like a good time to talk about the difference in document design for e-readers versus paper- readers. Put simply, people have different expectations and read differently when they read on a screen...[excerpt]

Pronoun Problems Part I, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Pronouns replace nouns, and the nouns they replace are called antecedents. Readers must be able to logically connect antecedents to their pronoun. And, pronouns need to agree with their antecedent in number, gender, and person. Most legal writers don’t have problems making pronouns agree with their antecedents in gender. Number and person can be a little trickier. If your sentence is confusing, there may be a problem with the antecedent and there may be a problem with the pronoun – so I’ll talk about each. [excerpt]

Words On The Page: Font Matters, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Typography, interestingly, is a bit of a hot issue amongst legal writers right now. Turns out, the way words look on a page affects not only the readability of the document: the believability of the content can change based on font. This month we will explore how the ways that words look on a page can help (or hurt) your argument by looking at fonts. [excerpt]

Robust Writing: Crafting Better Sentences, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

My students have ... learned that legal writing can be difficult to read. Sometimes the difficulty comes from hard concepts or ideas. Sometimes, however, the difficulty comes from difficult sentence structure. The writer has tried to pack too many ideas into one unit. I get to spend part of my time in the spring helping my students work on creating easily readable briefs and developing their own writing style. Part of that help includes editing their writing for more robust sentences. This issue, we’ll focus on crafting better sentences by creating shorter, less cluttered sentences. [excerpt]

Five Tips To Combat Verbosity, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Another member of The Advocate Editorial Board recently sent me a trial court’s order directing the movant to file a new motion that concentrated on eliminating verbosity. While I’m sure the attorney who received this order (which included the judge’s redlined suggestions!) was humiliated, we shouldn’t wait for a judge’s invitation (or humiliation) to combat verbosity in our writing.

Instead, we should take every opportunity to write better sentences. Wordy sentences tend to be filled with poor constructions that break the readers’ concentration, forcing them to stop and decipher our meanings....

The principle to writing better sentences is simple: Legal …

My Inbox: Follow-Up Advice For Readers, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Forsdyce-Ruff answers readers' questions about dashes and colons; en dashes, em dashes, and hyphens; serial commas; sentences beginning with conjunctions; and sentences beginning with 'hopefully.'

Problems With Pronouns Part Ii, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

In the March/April 2012 edition of The Advocate, I addressed the problems created when pronouns and their antecedents don’t match. There are other pesky pronoun problems lurking out there. This round, I will address specific types of pronouns — personal, reflexive, and possessive and how to use them correctly. [excerpt]

Confusing Word Pairs: Part Ii, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Way back in the January 2012 edition of The Advocate I introduced you to my inner grammar noodge by discussing confusing word pairs. Several readers gave me suggestions for pairs that had confused them, and since then I’ve fielded more than a few questions from both students and readers about the difference between certain words.

I recently realized that I had enough material to have a Confusing Word Pairs: Part II. Here are more confusing word pairs explained and some tips to help you use the correct word when writing or editing[--imply/infer, then/than, principal/principle, disinterested/uninterested, if/whether, affect/effect, awhile/a while, and …

Crafting Clear, Correct Sentences, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

We writers tend to make fairly predictable errors, so learning a few simple fixes can greatly improve our sentences. Here are six faults you can eliminate to fix your sentences: redundancy, repetition, subject-verb separation, misplaced modifiers, dangling participles, and unparallel phrasings. [excerpt]

Creating Separation And Emphasis In Your Writing Part Ii: Using Punctuation Within Sentences, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

The ideas legal writers want to express are often complex. Words and ideas within sentences must be defined or explained. Because of this complexity, many sentences in legal writing contain interrupters — words that break from the main idea of the sentence. These interrupters can be set off with dashes, commas, and parentheses. The choice of which mark to use depends on how much emphasis you want to draw to the interrupter. [excerpt]

Conjunction Junction: Making Conjunctions Function For You, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

... [T]o help you better understand how to make conjunctions function, let’s take a look at coordinating conjunctions, correlative conjunctions, and subordinating conjunctions to connect ideas. [excerpt]

Connections Count Part I: Generic Transitions, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Transitions serve an important function in any piece of writing: they connect the ideas in sentences and paragraphs and show the reader how lines of reasoning are advancing. These simple words let the reader know when to expect more detail or when to expect a different topic or when to expect a counter-point.

There are three basic types of transitions: generic, orienting, and substantive. We will look at generic transitions this month. [excerpt]

Fairness, Clarity, Precision, And Reaction: Gender-Free And Bias-Free Word Choice, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Every legal problem involves people. You cannot practice law without writing about people. But writing about people in a way that is clear and won’t cause a negative reaction by the reader takes some effort. The language of the law is moving toward gender- and bias-free word choices, but not as [quickly] as other disciplines. Yet, a few simple and easy changes can help move your writing toward being more precise, fair and clear, and help you avoid any negative reaction from the reader. [excerpt]

Know Your Audience: Writing To Non-Lawyers, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

I spend a lot of time in my classroom teaching my students about audience traits and expectations. We learn about how legal readers read and use documents and how we can better prepare our writing to meet the purpose and expectation. This is the norm in the legal academy.

Practically, however, that means many attorneys leave law school with great training for writing to judges and attorneys, but not necessarily great training on writing to clients or non-lawyers.

So this month we will focus on a few tips to help you better craft your writing to meet the non-lawyer’s expectations[--organization, …

Five Tools For Writing Fixes: Stocking The Legal Writer's Toolbox, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Add a desk book, grammar guide, usage dictionary, writing text, and citation manual to your toolbox, and you’ll find that your writing goes much more smoothly. [excerpt]

E-Editing: Time Saving Tips, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

... I don’t trust computer programs to ensure that I have error free documents. I do, however, trust them enough to use them to my advantage. I have, over time, created a series of steps I use to help me proof and edit my work. Use this simple editing checklist with your word processing program to save time and move one step closer to error-free documents. [excerpt]

Laughing All The Way To Court: Avoiding The Humor And Headaches Created By Misplaced Modifiers, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Modifiers can create unintended humor, or hurl unintended insults, when we forget that they need to be near the word they modify and let them drift [elsewhere]. [excerpt]

Creating Separation And Emphasis In Your Writing Part I: Joining Independent Clauses, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Independent clauses each have a subject and a verb and could stand alone as a grammatically correct sentence. For instance, “I enjoy walking on the beach,” “I disliked the hot humid weather,” and “I presented at a legal writing conference in Florida last summer” are all independent clauses. Each idea is a complete package; it has a subject and a verb and can function as a sentence. How I link them together with punctuation, however, can subtly change their meanings and shift the emphasis for the reader. It can also help the reader better understand how my ideas are related. …

Creating Clarity: Careful Use Of Contronyms, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Contronyms were not among the categories of “nyms” I learned as a child. I know all about synonyms, homonyms, and antonyms. So I was surprised when I recently learned about contronyms.

Contronyms are words that are their own antonyms (in fact, they are sometimes called autoantonyms). That’s right, the same word can have two opposing or contradictory meanings. Think of dust. Dust can mean to add fine particles to something:

The plane was dusting the field.

Or it can mean to remove fine particles.

I needed to dust my office after the windstorm.

Because contronyms have contradictory meanings, writers …

Cutting The Clutter: Three Steps To More Concise Legal Writing, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

... [G]ood legal writing should contain no more and no fewer words than necessary to convey the idea to the reader.... I suggest you spend your time removing wordy stock phrases, replacing weak verbs, and eliminating nominalizations to create more concise documents. [excerpt]

Connections Count Part Ii: Orienting And Substantive Transitions, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Last month we began exploring transitions and their usage. We covered generic transitions, their placement, and the importance of using the transition with the exact right meaning. This month, we are turning our attention to other categories of transitions: orienting and substantive. We will then end with a simple editing tip to help ensure "pop" in your writing. [excerpt]

Do Some Spring Cleaning: Throw Out Grammar Myths, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

... [M]any legal writers are bogged down by useless grammar myths: suggestions that they learned as “rules” early in their schooling. We all sat in an elementary school desk long ago and learned how to compose in English. Unfortunately, many students learned what were suggestions-to-help-them-become-more-sophisticated-and- better-writers as rules-never-to-be-broken. Here are my top five “rules” you should throw out as you do your spring cleaning.

Back To Basics: Subject And Verb Agreement, Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff

For simple sentences, agreement usually isn’t a problem. You can depend on how the sentence sounds to ensure your subject and verb agree. 'The professor requires all students to be in class prior to its start time.' Here the singular subject professor takes a singular verb requires. Easy! That just sounds correct .... Legal writers need to create more complex sentences, so relying on our ears won’t always steer us in the right direction. Agreement becomes trickier when subjects become more complex, and writers need to understand some basic agreement rules. [excerpt]