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‘Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can.
That is the only secret.’ – Matthew Arnold
A survey of judges (quoted in Bryan A. Garner – Legal Writing in Plain English)
when asked what they liked and disliked in writing, said they wanted a clear and concise style, well-organized (and without footnotes). The judges – and just about everyone else – said they liked:
A Clear Writing Style
- Clarity
- Clear concise statement of facts
- Clear division of thought
- Clear issues
- Complex ideas stated simply and directly
- Concise sentences
- Directness
- Instant clarity
- Short words
- Simple sentences
- Understandable language
- Well-put phrases
Concise Writing Style
- Brevity
- Concise sentences
- Short, to the point style
- Succinctness
Well-organized writing
- Immediate identification of the issues
- Informative headings
- Issue and answer in the first paragraph
- Logical flow
- Logical organization
- Structured paragraphs
Dislikes in Writing
The judges disliked:
- Boilerplate paragraphs
- Boring writing
- Circuitous sentences
- Clutter
- Complicated writing
- Convoluted writing
- Dancing around the issue
- Disjointed ideas
- Disorganized style
- Distortion of facts
- Failure to frame the question
- Footnotes – especially giant ones
- Impossibly small type
- Incompleteness
- Latin terms and technical language
- Lazy writing
- Lengthiness
- Long decisions
- Long paragraphs
- Long words
- Long-winded philosophical discourse
- Overstatement
- Passive Verbs
- Quotations
- Repetition
- Sentences broken up by citations
- Stream of consciousness
- Too many footnotes
- Unclear intentions
- Uninformative writing
- Unnecessary detail
- Unnecessary material
- Verbosity
- Writing you have to reread
StyleWriter 4 encourages the style preferred by all readers – clear, concise and readable.
‘Writers fear simplicity because they don’t want to be
considered simple-minded. In fact, though, there’s no better
way to strike your reader as an intelligent,
sensible writer than to simplify.’
Bryan A. Garner – Legal Writing in Plain English
