“If you can remember and identify these faults, you’ll become a more effective writer and self-editor,” according to legal writing guru, Bryan Garner. If you become a more effective and productive writer and self-editor, you will get a promotion and a raise. And win more cases. Okay, the last two are “maybes.”
Bryan Garner works tirelessly in his mission to reform legal writing and more specifically, legal writers. Because Bryan Garner cannot personally edit every written product hastily and sloppily produced (like a magical legal writing fairy) by poor legal writers, he produces helpful materials for legal writers of all experience levels. In this recent article, “The 20 Most Common Sentence-Level Faults Among Legal Writers,” Mr. Garner focuses not on the macro (large or small scale organization or content advice), but on the micro – the sentence-level. Good organization is essential, but the real communication occurs at the sentence level.
Here are Mr. Garner’s 20 Most Common Sentence-Level Legal Writing Faults (these should seem familiar):
- Subject-Verb Disagreement
- Unjustified Passive Voice
- Overcapitalization
- Misused Commas
- Illogic and Unclarity
- Misplaced Modifiers
- Dangling Participles
- Nonstandard Idioms
- Unparallel Phrasings
- Misused Possessives
- Misunderstood Mechanics of Quotations
- Redundancy
- Repetition
- Comma Splices with However
- Other Comma Splices
- Unclear Antecedent
- Misspellings
- Subject-Verb Separation
- Tense Shifts
- Erroneous Words
