Elements of Legal Style FROM OUR EDITORS
Perhaps the most prominent proponent of good legal writing, Bryan Garner's style guide is patterned after the classic Elements of Style but with an emphasis on the special difficulties of writing about legal matters. With his own no-nonsense sensibility, Garner will show you how to write with more clarity and forcefulness and get your points across with panache.
ANNOTATION
When Garner's award-winning Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage appeared in 1987, it was acclaimed throughout the English-speaking world. Now he has written a new writing guide, this one inspired by Strunk & White's classic book, The Elements of Style. Packed with samples from noted legal writers, including Oliver Wendell Holmes.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Like the Shrunk and White book, The Elements of Legal Style offers authoritative, down-to-earth, and often witty advice on a broad array of writing concerns, from basic grammatical rules to enhancing clarity, force, and persuasivenss. Unlike Shrunk and White, it is written for lawyers, law students, judges and their law clerks - for anyone who writes in and about the law. With broad experience as a practitioner, academic, and writing consultant, Garner knows first hand where legal writing goes wrong, and he pays particular attention to these trouble spots. He not only reveals how and why lawyers spill their words verbosely, he also memorably shows how laywers can clean up their spills. In a section on commonly misused words in law, Garner crisply guides readers through the hazards of legal wordchoice.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
A decade after the key first edition, Garner, editor in chief of Black's Law Dictionary and other works on legal writing, provides expanded coverage of appropriate legal prose and common errors in legal language, with the goal of encouraging clarity in legal writing. Throughout, he emphasizes fundamental rules of usage and fundamental principles of legal writing that range from punctuation, word choice, and syntactic arrangement to various forms of repetition. Suggestions regarding word choice give a good indication of his approach: he guides writers to strike out and replace fancy words, challenge vague words, and eschew euphemisms. In the foreword, Charles Alan Wright accurately comments that for lawyers "words are the only things we have to work with." Indeed, this book speaks not only to lawyers but to other writers as well, urging them to use style to develop persuasion, description, or analysis. Highly recommended for academic and larger public libraries. Steven Puro, St. Louis Univ. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
ACCREDITATION
Bryan A. Garner is a best-selling legal author with more than a dozen titles to his credit, including A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, The Winning Brief, A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, and Legal Writing in Plain English. He is also the editor in chief of Black's Law Dictionary in all its current editions.
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