Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [68]
Of course, the question is how to avoid falling into these traps when you don't know that they are traps. One answer is to stick with simple and common words. If “thorough” had an inherently negative connotation, you'd know it by now. The fancier and rarer terms, such as “fulsome,” are the ones likely to come with little-known dangers.
2. Even if you as a writer know the definition of a fancy word, your readers might not. However perfect the word might be in the abstract, it won't work well for you if many of your readers don't know it. Maybe that's their fault; maybe if our educational system worked better, they'd know the word. But that doesn't matter when you're choosing what words to use.
What matters is that using words that many of your readers don't know will not effectively communicate your point to them. At best it will merely distract them, as they try to deduce the meaning from context or (very rarely) look it up in a dictionary. At worst it will confuse them. In either case, it could alienate them, and make them less likely to keep reading, and to be open to your argument even if they do keep reading.
In particular, avoid using words that you have just learned. (The exception is when the words are legal terms that you're expected to learn in law school, and that nearly all lawyers do learn in law school.) If you hadn't learned the word during all your years of pre-law-school education, many of your readers—law students, lawyers, and even judges and academics—are probably in the same position you were in before you learned the word.
Nor should you worry that avoiding fancy words will make your prose look “dumbed down.” In my experience, people notice misuse of fancy words. They notice use of fancy words, and often dislike such use even when it's technically proper.
But they don't notice the absence of fancy words, in a passage that consists entirely of simple words: They just notice what the simple words are saying, which is what you want readers to notice. What persuades and impresses readers is the quality of the argument, not the sophistication of the wording.
N. Tip: Read a Usage Guide
The best way to avoid usage traps is to get a good usage guide, and read it cover to cover. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage is my favorite, but you can choose others as well.
These guides are quite readable, because they are more like miniencyclopedias than like traditional dictionaries: Rather than just including a definition, they tend to briefly discuss each usage question they cover. These discussions are often interesting, and sometimes witty.
And reading them alerts you to where the landmines are buried. You might not know that there are controversies about the words “disinterested,” “enormity,” and “historic” (to give just a small sample); but the usage guides will tell you.
Reading such a guide takes time, but there's no need to read it in one sitting. If you can read a few entries a day, you'll learn how to avoid many potentially embarrassing problems, and you might have fun while you learn.
O. Clichés
Generally avoid overused phrases, such as (to borrow examples that I've cut from drafts of this book) “more than meets the eye,” “law of the land,” “flat wrong,” “time and time again,” “mix and match,” “done to death,” “abandon ship,” “chock full,” or “go back to square one.”
These phrases may seem like colorful intensifiers that catch the reader's attention; and sometimes they indeed do that, which is why the advice “avoid clichés” sometimes seems overstated. But the advice is usually sound. These phrases were once (I almost wrote “once upon a time”) novel and vivid, and added flair to people's writing. But overuse has drained most clichés of this capacity. And because authors tend to overestimate their own wittiness, they often think that a cliché will add color even when it really doesn't.