Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [176]
Putting the material on the Web can also save you time and trouble later, especially since it will decrease the chances that you'll lose the data. Even if no one else will ever check the data, the law review citecheckers probably will, so you'll in any case need to format it in a way that others can read it. You might as well use a medium—the Web—that will let you do it once, and not have to worry about repeating it each time someone asks you for the information.
Whether or not you put your data on the Web, make multiple copies or printouts of your materials, and keep them in a safe place. Don't just rely on your computer, or you might lose everything to a disk drive crash. And don't rely on the journal's filing system, even if you sent in the unpublished material and the journal labeled it in the footnotes as being “on file with the law review.” I haven't investigated the matter closely, but I highly doubt that such files are well-organized and well-maintained.
CONCLUSION
This book has tried to provide a short but comprehensive guide to academic legal writing, from choosing a topic to publishing and publicizing the finished work. I hope it helps you make your article better, and encourages you to write still more.
Writing and publishing can help you become a better writer, and thus a better lawyer. It can help you become a more successful lawyer, by getting you a good grade, a good board position on your law review, a publication credit, and the clerkships, lawyer jobs, or teaching jobs that these credentials can yield. And it can, even if only slightly, influence the law for the better.
APPENDIX I: CLUMSY WORDS AND PHRASES*
Here are some common clunkers, and their simpler, more readable replacements. Naturally, there's some subjectivity in any such list—other writers will doubtless disagree with me about some of these items. Moreover, the replacements aren't always perfect synonyms: Sometimes, for instance, you need to use the clunker as part of a legal term of art (e.g., “a cease and desist letter”).
Still, I suspect that nine times out of ten the replacements will be better than the original, and that you should at least consider making the change. Of course, some of these changes also require some grammatical adjustment of other parts of the sentence.
A. Needlessly Formal Words
“Short words are best, and the old words when
short are the best of all.”
—attributed to Winston Churchill
Some words are fancy synonyms for simpler words. Your readers will know these complex words—but such words take more time and effort to process than simple ones. Switching to simpler words will make your work more pleasant to read, and will make it less likely that readers will set it aside.
1. Verbs
2. Nouns
3. Adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions
B. Circumlocutions
These are phrases that talk around the subject instead of getting to the point. They often add unneeded prepositional phrases or other grammatical complexities that make the sentence harder to parse and its substance harder to see.
1. Generally
2. Verbs turned into nouns or adjectives
3. “The fact that”
The phrase “the fact that” adds an extra conceptual level; you're not just talking about an event or condition (“John sold the land to Mary”), but rather about the fact that the event or condition occurred (“the fact that John sold the land to Mary”). Sometimes this extra complexity is necessary—but rarely. The phrase can usually be omitted entirely (perhaps with some grammatical adjustment of the following clause, e.g., “John's selling the land to Mary”), or replaced with “that.”
C. Redundancies
These are