Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [179]
And here's the text with those problems corrected:
The proposed Child Firearms Safety Act would be ineffective. It will do little good. The few benefits of the bill, notably the probable slight decrease in childhood gun accidents, do not exceed the drawbacks, such as the inaccessibility of guns during a home invasion. Therefore, unless some amendments are made to the bill, I recommend that you oppose it.
The revised version is already shorter, but the revisions expose something deeper: The four sentences overlap considerably.
1. The first sentence says the law is ineffective (the original first sentence called it “inconsequential”).
2. The second sentence says the same thing, originally by saying that the law “carries little weight” and “makes little difference.”
3. The third sentence explains why the law is ineffective, and makes the first two sentences superfluous: Explaining that the law's benefits don't exceed the drawbacks also communicates that the law would on balance be ineffective.
4. The fourth sentence says that the Senator should oppose the law as it is now written, which adds little to the first three sentences.
Here's the text with the fat (the first, second, and most of the fourth sentence) trimmed away:
I recommend that you oppose the proposed Child Firearms Safety Act. Its few benefits, notably the probable slight decrease in childhood gun accidents, do not exceed the drawbacks, such as the inaccessibility of guns during a home invasion.
This is shorter, and says pretty much all that the original says, but it still lacks force—as did the original, but this revision just shows the weakness more clearly. And this weakness comes from the second sentence's primarily focusing on abstractions (“benefits” and “drawbacks”) and not the concrete things to which the abstractions refer (“slight decrease in childhood gun accidents” and “the inaccessibility of guns during a home invasion”). What's more, the second concrete phrase (“the inaccessibility of guns ...”) is itself a bit abstract: The real problem isn't “inaccessibility” as such, but the interference with self-defense. While abstractions sometimes work as political rhetoric, intelligent readers are usually more swayed by concrete points.
So here's an alternative:
I recommend that you oppose the proposed Child Firearms Safety Act. The Act will probably only slightly decrease childhood gun accidents, but will likely make it substantially harder for people to defend themselves and their children against criminals.
This isn't the best possible rewrite, but it's better than the preceding version—and it's much better than what we began with.
Before: 89 words, 477 characters.
After: 38 words, 214 characters.
All the information, fewer than half the words.
2. Editing for Concreteness, p. 141
Here again is the paragraph, with the clauses numbered for convenience:
[1] The existence of antimask laws poses difficult questions of constitutional law. [2] We know that the freedom of speech is one of our most cherished rights, [3] especially when there is a danger that the free expression of unpopular speakers would be deterred by the fear of negative consequences. [4] And yet the prevention of crime, [5] including crime facilitated by the wearing of masks, [6] must surely be ranked as one of the more compelling of the possible government interests. [7] The public understandably wants to avoid the harm to property, persons, and the social fabric that may flow from such crime.
Sentence 1 says nothing substantive. It does try to persuade readers that the article is important; but the best way to do that is to describe the problem in a way that will make readers come to that conclusion themselves. Simply asserting the difficulty or importance of the problem doesn't help much.