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ARTICLE · 16 FEBRUARY 2011

The Appellate Record Blog: Short Power

Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP
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Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

United StatesLitigation, Mediation & Arbitration
Kendall Gray
Kendall Gray
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Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

-- Winston Churchill

At the suggestion of a reader, I recently got 100 Ways To Improve Your Writing by Gary Provost. It was not written for lawyers, which makes it the perfect tool for improving your legal writing.

Building on the two, recent posts about my exploding cranium (here and here), the more legal something is, the less readable it becomes. So the goal of every legal writer ought to be to write like a writer--or maybe like a reader--not like a lawyer.

Provost's book is filled with useful rules and reminders to assist in that effort. For example, the first rule in the sixth chapter, "Twelve Ways to Give Your Words Power" is "Use Short Words."

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