The Four Cs Of Writing .

Diamond shoppers use four Cs to select a diamond. I propose four Cs, clarity, cut, color, and carrot (a homonym of carat), to improve written work.

Clarity

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan recently said that "the most important thing in a brief is clarity." Clarity, whether in a brief, a contract, or any other communication, is key to getting one's message across. And clarity requires work. It requires a writer to analyze the words to ensure that they say what the writer means and nothing else.

Ambiguity, the presence of more than one reasonable meaning, is clarity's greatest enemy. Why? Because a writer's intended message may be present while another meaning may be lurking. And the law, in the case of contracts, punishes ambiguous writing by construing ambiguities against the drafter. Some actual headlines provide examples that illustrate the problem of ambiguity.