Last week I confessed my technology limitations and in doing so, launched practicelaw’s 2 minute tech tip series. Today I get to redeem my reputation.

With this post we are launching our two minute writing tips series. And guess what? My writing skills far exceed my tech skills. I’ve taught legal writing to both undergraduates (at Hamline) and law students (at William Mitchell and University of Minnesota) off and on for 10 + years. In my law practice days, I drafted transactional real estate documents. I enjoy creative writing and am adept at drafting crystal clear notes to remind my kids to empty the dishwasher (which doesn’t mean it gets emptied however). Even my boss, the practicelaw tech king, admitted today that I have a “personality” when I blog. (I pointed out that I have one even when I don’t.)

But, like everyone, I have my dark side. Back in high school, I couldn’t keep my plurals and possessives straight. So I just “wrote around” them. To avoid the “apostrophe-or-not” paralysis, I just penned, “The hat of the boy.” Then Miss Yates happened — beady eyes, hair in a bun, voice incredulous. “You mean to tell me you don’t have two minutes to figure this out?” I did and now wince whenever I see it screwed up, which is often.

Miss Yates is right. We all have our bugaboos and we all have two minutes. Most lawyers are decent writers and know how to use grammar correctly. But we can all stand to improve our style. As Nathaniel Hawthorne recognized, “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”  We hope our two minute tips make better writing easier.

So take two and improve your writing. The MSBA online services team will provide one writing tip each week.  We’ve got attorneys and English majors, poets and former journalists and law review editors on staff. We write and edit every day, consult style manuals constantly and have lots to share.

Our first tip:

Proofread your draft at least once without reading your words. Just note where the sentence starts and where it ends. The ideal sentence length is 15 to 20 words, so if you are on line 3 and you haven’t encountered a period, stop. Back up. Ask yourself honestly if anyone could read that long drawn out string of words and understand them, much less want to read it. Remind yourself that lawyering is in large part a communications profession. If someone can’t read and understand your sentence, you’re not doing your job. So restrain yourself. Break it in two and put in a period.  If breaking it up is hard to do, cut out words. Here’s a good list of unnecessary words.

Don’t open up your communication to Winston Churchill’s assessment: “This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.”

Go ahead, take the plunge. Make Miss Yates proud.

Posted by: Nancy Hupp