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Where Writing Talent Goes to Die
Do As I Say and Not as I did: Skip Law School
This goes out to people who are articulate in the written form of English and therefore perhaps a dying breed. It was inspired when one of my editors years ago hurled a really painful remark my way.
He said I write like a lawyer.
A legal education will seriously bollix your writing. People think lawyers are trying to be too subtle, to make every word choice carry too much freight.
No.
What ruins a lawyer’s writing is anticipating objections, which leads to what becomes almost a rule: a clause, a sentence, a paragraph can never have too many modifiers. Every qualification, every cavil, is one less hole in your argument.
This is the precise opposite of good writing, where it’s OK to leave ambiguity and if different people can read different things into your product that is an artistic success where a lawyer is trained to see a failure. The lawyer is seeking words that can only mean one thing and leave no seams where a lever may be inserted to pry the whole thing apart.
The best writing makes the mundane
new again.
Lawyers appear to have huge vocabularies not because that’s necessarily so, but because there are so…
