Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [82]
Being more precise can also show you possible problems with your argument, and help you fix those problems. For instance, once you make explicit that you are talking about all people age 17 or younger, you should wonder: Why are you drawing the line at this age? Does this line fit with the general structure of your claim? For instance, if you're using the statistic as an argument for laws that require that guns be kept unloaded, would such a law affect accidents involving 17–year-olds the same way that it would affect accidents involving 7–year-olds? By using specific terms, you'll more clearly see the relationship between the evidence you're using and the argument you're making.
E. Try To Avoid Foreseeable Misunderstandings
Guns, one article says, “produce a toll of over 35,000 killed every year and hundreds of thousands more raped, robbed, and assaulted in firearms-related violence.” Quick: About how many gun murders were there in 1995, the year that the author was likely talking about?
“Well,” you might say, being a careful reader, “we don't know; the 35,000 might include manslaughter, too.” You might even realize it includes accidents, though you may have been distracted from that by the context, which focuses on “violence” and crime. So how many gun murders, manslaughters, and accidental killings were there, put together?
The answer, it turns out, is 17,500. Why? Because 18,500 of the over 35,000 were suicides.44
Of course, some readers may believe that suicides should be considered on par with homicides or fatal accidents in determining the costs of gun possession—but others might not. The readers should make this decision for themselves, based on nonmisleading information. In the context of a sentence where the most explicit descriptions are of violent crime (“raped, robbed, and assaulted in firearms-related violence”), many readers will infer that the less explicitly defined term “killed” also refers to criminal killings. This is especially so because the typical reader will be reading the sentence quickly, rather than thinking closely about the various possible literal definitions of each word.
So when you write a sentence, think whether some readers may read it as making a different claim than the one you're trying to make. In particular, think about what assumptions readers may make based on the context, and make sure those aren't the wrong assumptions.
F. Understand Your Source
Carefully read the source on which you're relying, and understand how all its elements relate to each other. For instance, if you're relying on a statutory section, read the whole statute (or, for vast statutes like the Tax Code, at least all the related sections). Pay especially close attention to the sections containing the definitions, and to other generally applicable provisions that might shed light on the provision that you're considering.
Likewise, if you're looking at a statistical table, make sure you understand what the table discusses:
a. what time the table covers (one year? ten?);
b. what geographical or jurisdictional areas it covers (the whole country? some states? only those states that reported their results to the federal agency? only federal prosecutions?);
c. what events the table covers (all homicides? only solved homicides? only murders?);
d. what sources the table relies on, and what inaccuracies there might be in those sources;
e. how various line items relate to each other.
Consider two examples:
1. Assume that an article says,
[T]he annual accidental death toll for handgun-related incidents is slightly under