Legal Writing in Plain English: A Text With Exercises Review

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(More customer reviews)Bryan A. Garner is leading what might be a Quixotic charge to make lawyers write clear, clean, unambiguous and even interesting prose. This book is a recent addition to the Garner arsenal, which includes the excellent The Winning Brief and A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage. The anonymous writer from New York who slams Garner is wrong. He claims that traditional legal drafting has stood the test of time and is readily understood by judges, who ultimately have to interpret it. If the writing were clear to begin with, the parties wouldn't get to a judge. They'd likely settle. And that writer ignores the fact that there are thousands, perhaps millions, of legal decisions over contract disputes, almost all arising from documents that were "traditionally drafted." And different judges can decide differently about the meaning of a clause. That writer askes rhetorically whether Garner would insist that mathematicians use prose to make their work clear to laypeople. The rhetoric ignores the fact that mathematics is its own language. Legal writing is written in English, the same English used to buy groceries, talk lovingly to your spouse, and complain to the doctor about what ails you. There is no valid reason a contract should be beyond the comprehension of a layperson, other than lawyers' need to feel like they're elevated professionals with a grip on arcana. And the writer's praise of "Notwithstanding anything to the contrary" as an incantatory phrase in contracts overlooks an obvious improvement: "DESPITE anything in this agreement to the contrary . . . ." Garner is a brilliant, insightful teacher who cares deeply about the language and its highest and best use. We know what happens with legalese: litigation and contention and noncomprehension. Give plain English a try, with Garner as your guide to Aquinas's trinity of wholeness, harmony, radiance, and of course clarity clarity clarity.

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Admirably clear, concise, down-to-earth, and powerful-unfortunately, these adjectives rarely describe legal writing, whether in the form of briefs, opinions, contracts, or statutes. In Legal Writing in Plain English, Bryan A. Garner provides lawyers, judges, paralegals, law students, and legal scholars sound advice and practical tools for improving their written work. The book encourages legal writers to challenge conventions and offers valuable insights into the writing process: how to organize ideas, create and refine prose, and improve editing skills. In essence, it teaches straight thinking—a skill inseparable from good writing.Replete with common sense and wit, the book draws on real-life writing samples that Garner has gathered through more than a decade of teaching in the field. Trenchant advice covers all types of legal materials, from analytical and persuasive writing to legal drafting. Meanwhile, Garner explores important aspects of document design. Basic, intermediate, and advanced exercises in each section reinforce the book's principles. (An answer key to basic exercises is included in the book; answers to intermediate and advanced exercises are provided in a separate Instructor's Manual, free of charge to instructors.) Appendixes include a comprehensive punctuation guide with advice and examples, and four model documents.Today more than ever before, legal professionals cannot afford to ignore the trend toward clear language shorn of jargon. Clients demand it, and courts reward it. Despite the age-old tradition of poor writing in law, Legal Writing in Plain English shows how legal writers can unshackle themselves.Legal Writing in Plain English includes:*Tips on generating thoughts, organizing them, and creating outlines.*Sound advice on expressing your ideas clearly and powerfully.*Dozens of real-life writing examples to illustrate writing problems and solutions.*Exercises to reinforce principles of good writing (also available on the Internet).*Helpful guidance on page layout.*A punctuation guide that shows the correct uses of every punctuation mark.*Model legal documents that demonstrate the power of plain English.

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The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing Review

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(More customer reviews)I first encountered "Nuts and Bolts" several years ago, when it was just a web-site. Back then, Yahoo! gave it one of their "cool sites" awards (complete with cute little sunglasses.) It became such a hit on the web, Hackett decided to give Professor Harvey a publishing contract.
Its great that they did, because the other college writing handbooks are either deadly dull or sprouting whiskers. Nuts and Bolts is neither dry nor bewhiskered -- it is hip, handy, and highly literate. This new book could (and should) evict Strunk and White, Turabian, Chicago Style Book, and all the other has-beens and never-weres as the one book every college student (yes, including science majors) should carry in their book bag. (Dissertation-writers may still need Chicago for their fine brush-work, but everyone else will find this jack-of-all-topics addresses most high-school and college needs.)
What's so great about this book? Essentially, it provides one-stop shopping for the essentials of good college term-paper writing -- usually dispensed in travel-sized doses of only three or four pages.
Nuts and Bolts presumes little, but teaches much. It rides no high horses, grinds no axes, curries no favors. Yet it is both idiot- and pedant -proof. Never written an essay before, but want to know what one is? Nuts and Bolts will tell you, without making you feel stupid for having asked. (Enlightening but non-overwhelming flashback to Montaigne included). Want to know what good sentences look like? (hint: active verbs) How to cite a "blog" in an essay? (take that, Strunk and White!) "Nuts and Bolts" does all this and (much) more while always remembering that brevity is the soul of pedagogy.
Finally, though it crisply marches student essays from the first head-scratch to the last push of the "print" button, its elegant writing and efficient layout make Nuts and Bolts ideal for sustained soaks or surgical strikes as needs dictate. Perfect example: Nuts and Bolts provides side-by-side comparisons of how each of the three major citation-systems expect students to format books, articles, websites (etc.) in their bibliographies and footnotes. A veritable god-send for the student triple-majoring in English Lit, Psychology, and Bio!
This book is written so clearly, and presumes so little background on the part of its reader (Professor Harvey has obviously studied the average scantily-trained college student in its native habitat) that you almost don't realize how supremely intelligent it is. Though it will probably mostly be assigned for remedial purposes, the book is so engagingly written it will inspire even very good writers -- teachers and professors included -- to carry it around in their own soft-sider brief cases. Adios, Strunk and White. Hello, Nuts and Bolts.

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Engagingly written and illustrated with scores of telling examples, this plainspoken how-to book for college writers identifies those qualities that most typically distinguish good writing from bad and provides practical measures for avoiding pitfalls. Included are do's and don'ts for achieving concision, clarity, and flow, as well as pointers on using punctuation, writing gracefully, citing sources, and structuring persuasive writing. Championing "the plain style" with a keen appreciation for the uses to which language can be put—including abuses to which it is prone—The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing is a guide that never fails to remind readers why good writing matters so much in the first place, in college and beyond.

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Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace Review

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(More customer reviews)This book fulfills a long needed addition to Mills' 1997 effort Evidence! Citation and Analysis for the Family Historian. Genealogy, as a discipline, has practioners that range from the casual gedcom collector to professional and academic researchers. For the last several decades, there has been a strong movement toward standards in genealogical research, in an effort to gain credibility on par with historians and other social sciences. At 816 pages (884 total pages), reading it from cover to cover is a bit like reading a dictionary, which few of us rarely do.
Judging from the buzz on various mailing lists before the book was released, you might expect that Mills was providing merely a reference manual or citation style manual for genealogists. However, the title, Evidence Explained, hints at more. Throughout the text, Mills uses the term "historian" over the use of the term, "genealogist." This shift in terminology is perhaps in keeping with the direction that the discipline is moving. Additionally, Mills devoted the first chapter to the subject of evaluating sources and evidence contained within them, a subject that still causes confusion for many experienced family historians (i.e., genealogists).
For those of us who would rather read a novel than a style manual, I recommend reading the first two chapters in their entireity. Both chapters cover general concepts that are prominent in genealogical research and citation writing. The remaining twelve chapters deal with the various types of historical records or artifacts encountered while researching family history. Starting with Chapter 3, Mills provides the historian with a section, entitled "QuickCheck Models." These models provide a simple, "view-at-a-glance" template for the various types of records referenced by that chapter. The "QuickCheck" models are easy to locate, appearing on pages with a greyed background to help them standout while looking at the the edge of the book.
To aid navigation, each chapter's title page contains a table of contents to the QuickCheck Models. However, supplying a TOC for these brief sections seem unnecessary. The models, themselves, appear one to a page with the desciption (or title) of the model at the top of the page. Rather, the user of the style manual would have been better served if a TOC had been created for the main text of each chapter, which is much more detailed and offers information not provided by the models.
Paragraphs within each chapter are identified by a two level numbering system (chapter, paragraph). Mills mentioned that she modeled her manual after the Chicago Style Manual (CSM), which also uses this numbering schema for navigation purposes. Like CSM, Evidence Explained opens each paragraph with a run-in subhead identifying the subject matter of the paragraph. However, nowhere is there a reference or cross-index to the paragraph numbers, themselves, making them somewhat superfluous.
Each chapter contains a section called, "Guidelines and Examples." This is the major text explaining issues related to each category of sources. Don't forego reading this part of the text in favor of just using the models. Here, I recommend that the researcher employ the JIT approach to reading. JIT (meaning "just in time") is a term borrowed from manufacturing whereby parts to make a product are ordered and shipped to the factory "just in time" to assemble the product, saving time and the expense of warehousing a large inventory of parts. When searching for the most appropriate style template to use--and once you have identified the source type--,read the sub-section labeled "Basic Issues" within the "Guidelines and Examples" section. Then, proceed to the paragraph that describes the specific type of source. (This is where a chapter TOC would have helped.) Reading the "Basic Issues" section will help the researcher see how concepts in citations relate to that specific source.
Another feature that Mills employed in the text was the use of icons to indicate explanations of citations related to microfilm, computer databases, etc. Mills did not explain this feature in her preface, perhaps thinking that no explanation was necessary. For an example of how these icons are used, refer to page 347. As a matter of fact, the lack of an introduction and orientation to the book seems to be its greatest weakness. Any reference manual--and this book certainly fits that description--should offer the reader an orientation to the conventions used within.
Finally, Mills provided two indexes to the manual. The first is the general index. It offers the best way to apply the JIT principle, sometimes directing you to multiple examples on separate pages. In absence of a chapter table of contents, the index is your only resource for navigating the book. The second index is to the QuickCheck Models only. It is redundant of the general index, which also includes references to the QuickCheck Models. When searching the index(es), be certain that you know which index you are purusing. The two indexes do not have separate page headers.
Despite the above-mentioned weaknesses, it is a monumental and welcomed improvement over earlier works and, no doubt, will help us all become better writers of our family research. I can still highly recommend it.


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Evidence Explained is the definitive guide to the citation and analysis of historical sources.It begins with a simple question: Why do we invest so much of our energy into the citation of sources?Followed by the intriguing answer:Because all sources are not created equal.As a citation guide, Evidence Explained is built on this simple question and answer.According to the author, there are no historical resources we can trust at face value. Records simply offer evidence, and their assertions may or may not be true. To decide what actually happened, we must understand those records. To analyze that evidence and judge what to believe, we also need particular facts about those records.Thus, Evidence Explained has two principal uses: it provides citation models for most historical sources especially original materials not covered by classic citation guides such as The Chicago Manual of Style. Beyond that it can help us understand each type of record and identify each in such detail that we and our readers will know not only where to go to find our source, but, equally important, the nature of that source so that the evidence can be better interpreted and the accuracy of our conclusions properly appraised.Highlights Covers all contemporary and electronic sources not discussed in traditional style manuals, including digital, audio, and video sources Explains citation principals and includes more than 1,000 citation models for virtually every source type Shows readers where to go to find their sources and how to describe them and evaluate them Teaches readers to separate facts from assertions and theory from proof in the evaluation of evidence.Most importantly, Evidence Explained discusses source citations for every known class of records, including microfilm and microfiche, and records created by the new digital media:WebsitesBlogs Digital books and journalsDVDsCDsAudio filesPodcastsEveryone Needs This Book-Carry it around and consult it for the correct citation of any source you come across-Keep it constantly at your side to help you identify sources-Use it to evaluate digital and Internet sources-Make it your standard for citing sources and evaluating evidence in your day-to-day research

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