Monday, December 14, 2009

Bankruptcy Judge Issues Writing Guidelines - "Judge Orders You to Stop Writing Stupidly"

Lawyerist.com has an article about United States Bankruptcy Court Judge Robert Kressel's writing guidelines.  The Judge stated his goal as follows:
My goal in preparing orders, as it is for all of my legal writing, is to use regular grammatical English as much as possible. A secondary goal is to use actual statutory language as much as possible, rather than changing or paraphrasing it, which runs the risk of changing its meaning. When you prepare proposed orders, please keep these principles in mind.
The entire guideline can be found HERE.  A couple of the guidelines are below:

Never use and/or.
Never use capital letters to identify something unless it is a proper name.
Never use quotation marks and parenthesis to identify something.
Eliminate superfluous words.

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