Ways to Write Poorly

Writing is one of the core skills of the legal profession, and there are many amazing legal writers. The first draft I wrote for the Hon. Alan Loeb on the Court of Appeals came back drenched in red and completely reworked. This was a slight shock but also the beginning of a great apprenticeship. Another attorney writer I worked for and learned from was Scott Browning, who had a genius for telling a compelling story. Yet many lawyers don’t write well. Worse, most of them don’t know it. Writing failures have different causes and solutions. Let’s look at a few types of poor writers. (It’s possible to be more than one type.) If you wonder if you are any of these types, give your writing to a candid non-lawyer—such as a teenage relative—and brace yourself.

The Pompous Pontificator is the most skilled of our poor writers, so much so that he is in fact a poor communicator rather than a poor writer. This lawyer writes grammatically and in an organized way. He can handle the English language. But he writes like a lawyer and not like a human. He’s boring and nearly incomprehensible. The cause of this writing style is usually law school. Law school reinforces a strong drive to impress people with how erudite you are and teaches you a lot of specialized vocabulary to work with. Legal cases and briefs are often written in this style.

The problem with the Pompous Pontificator’s style is that few people can understand what he writes. And he may actually be happy with that, because it shows that he’s that much smarter than everyone else. But this style needs correcting. Writing is supposed to communicate, and if you aren’t communicating with much of your audience, you aren’t writing well.

What is the cure? The Pompous Pontificator needs to care more about communicating than being smart. Many people can say something complex in a complicated way. It takes a really good writer and thinker to say something complex in an accessible and simple way. Fewer people will be impressed, but more people will understand the concepts. Once the Pompous Pontificator understands that simplicity has a power that jargon does not, he may be willing to improve. (Though honestly, he may not.) If he does want to improve, he must rework the writing into shorter, simpler sentences. He must remove adverbs and Latinate vocabulary. The Microsoft 365 Editor can tell this writer what grade level he’s currently hitting. Late high school is a good mark to shoot for.

Our next writer is the Rambling River. She writes in a stream of consciousness. The writing may be accurate and grammatical enough, and the arguments are all in there somewhere. But they’re disorganized and hard to follow, as they split into different channels and occasionally reunite. Patient judges may map these streams, but most people give up. High level professionals will have a poor opinion of her writing, but most people will just think she sounds like a lawyer. They already assume that no one can understand lawyers.

What is the cure? The Rambling River should read and absorb books like Bryan Garner’s The Winning Brief, or better yet, take one of his courses. The courses are not cheap, but the logical way Garner approaches writing structure can work almost overnight improvement for the Rambling River. After all, she writes fairly well—she just needs to divert her writing into clear and straight channels of thinking.

Our last writer is the Screen Saver. This writer’s work is full of subtle or even blatant grammatical errors like sentence fragments and problems with dependent clauses. It’s not just that the thought is disorganized, but the writing itself is poor. The Screen Saver will have a hard time getting a job in a practice area where writing is important. The application will get screened out because of the writing sample. This writer may need to stick to practice areas where lawyers don’t write a lot.

The cause of this poor writing is usually an inadequate education and way too much exposure to screen media (TV and its cousins). Very few good writers are not also voracious readers. Someone who has not spent a childhood reading, either for pleasure, or forced to in school, is at an enormous disadvantage. Just as you can’t play pro basketball if you haven’t spent your childhood shooting hoops, you can’t write like a professional if you haven’t had the reading input. While practicing writing is important, what drives good writing is thousands of hours reading.

What is the cure? In the short term, this writer can benefit from tools like AI. To be clear, AI doesn’t write at the top level. Its writing is typically bland, predictable, and boring. But it’s very good at clear grammatical writing and basic organization. It’s also good with different tones. Working with AI, this writer can generate product that is at least acceptable.

In the long term, the Screen Saver needs a new education, and this will take years. This means reading books. (Not legal cases, because those train the writer to be a Pompous Pontificator. Adding that layer onto poor writing creates a real mess.) The writer can read any genre—but the books need to be well written. Reading poorly written trash just teaches you to write trash. (By “trash” here, I mean poor writing, but the follower of Jesus will also want to avoid moral trash.) In any genre, you can find recommendations of books that are well written—anything from history to fantasy to WWII era murder mysteries. An added benefit is that well-written books are much more interesting than poorly written ones. Turn off the screen, curl up on the sofa, and start reading.

Whether we’re good writers or not, we can all improve on the humanity of our style, the clarity and organization of our thought, and the power of our sentences. Study writing, get critiques, edit and revise—and read!