Audience Is (Almost) Everything

It was summer 2020—still the height of the pandemic—and the most popular video game in creation was “Among Us.” In this game, players become blob-shaped astronauts working on a spaceship. One astronaut is assigned to be the killer, and that person goes around murdering other players. The point of the game is to figure out which player is the murderer.

Chatting is a big part of the game, as players discover blob-shaped astronaut corpses and try to figure out who was last seen with the dearly departed blob. That chatting usually uses online vernacular: acronyms and misspellings and lingo and never an ounce of punctuation.

We tried playing the game as a family, with my wife, our two teenagers, and me. I wanted to make the kids laugh—it was a dark time, after all—so I decided to only use correct grammar and complete sentences while chatting. It went something like this:

Purple Blob: Did u see

Yellow Blob: wut

Blue Blob: brb

Red Blob: W00t

Me: Capital game, chums! Yellow Astronaut, you really gave the murderer his comeuppance! He shall rue the day that he endeavored to slay the crew of this spacefaring machine!

Blue Blob: wut

Yellow Blob: wut

Red Blob: wut

And so on. As you can see, it quickly turned into me impersonating a veteran of Britain’s Royal Air Force while confusing several space blobs.

The point is that the effectiveness of communication isn’t just about the communicator’s output. It’s about the audience, too. I was using correct grammar with recognizable words but my style was completely wrong for the audience (or “cringey,” according to my kids).

And that brings us to lawyers’ writing preferences. You will find lawyers with very strong opinions about writing and typography. A good percentage of those lawyers will act as if they formed these opinions when someone descended from Mount Sinai with two large, stone tablets. That view is a trap. The audience should drive lawyers’ choices about writing and style, not the lawyers themselves.

So you think contractions make writing legal writing better? Maybe so. Does the Court you’re writing for use contractions? If not, is there a risk that your style might obscure your message?

Or suppose you’re writing for a court that tends to favor conversational writing, but you’ve been channeling Learned Hand throughout your forty-year career. Is there a risk that your style is going to land in court with the same thud that my Royal Air Force chatting produced in “Among Us”?

Maybe you believe citations belong in the body of a brief and never in footnotes. What happens when you’re writing a brief for a court that uses citational footnotes? Do you take a page from your audience or do you stick with what you think best, even if your audience doesn’t share that view?

There are no one-size-fits-all rules here. And that’s point. Lawyers should have their antennae up to make sure they don’t sound like my Royal Air Force veteran playing “Among Us.” Sometimes, your preferences should yield—even if just a bit—to your audience.

Don’t take my word for it. Research now confirms that “linguistic mirroring”—using language that fits your audience—can make you a more effective communicator. For example, see Maxim Sytch and Yong Kim’s article, “Want to Win Someone Over? Talk Like They Do.” in the Harvard Business Review (December 8, 2020). The authors looked at lawyers’ writing styles and determined that “the legal teams that mirrored the judges’ linguistic styles were significantly more likely to win their cases.” They found that “the linguistic-mirroring advantage was far more common among lawyers who knew their judges well” and that lawyers who clerked for the judge or “still lived within driving distance” of the judge were most successful.

There’s a two-part lesson here for lawyers who care about written persuasion: (1) listen and (2) be flexible.