"Put Down the Thesaurus and Step Away from the Opinion":
South Carolina Appellate Law Blog's reaction to this line:
The cognoscenti of health care nomology trust and rely upon Peer Review Statutes as the quiddity and hypostasis of the hospital/physician relationship. The quintessence and elixir of the peer review process is confidentiality.
But this is...what's the legal term for "crap?"
While other professions use peer review and edited publications, we entrust 3Ls with the responsibility of determining what is worth printing--and to do this they have 2Ls "edit" the submitted work.
Add to that the insanity of some of the bluebook rules and many people leave law school with the expectation that bad writing is somehow "good." Some of these people become judges.
Clear writers like Scalia, Posner, and Kozinski are viewed as the excepions and not the rule. Organizations like the National Judicial College certainly help, but we still end up with a lot of obtuse crap masquerading as legal opinion.
I'd trade "quintessence and elixir" for "the relationship between the hospital and the physician" any day.
The man is a menace!
I spent a lot of time on projects making incredibly technical material understandable to the layman, why can't lawyers and politicians do the same? You'd think less confusions would mean less lawsuits if laws and rulings were written better.
(I don't spend much time on comments though :) )
Got it in one. ;^)
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble.
You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear."
I'm sorry, but most technical manuals I have read are hardly wonderful examples of clarity.
In fairness, I suspect that most of the really bad ones I have read are machine translations.
But I always got asked back and had plenty of clients.. back when I tried. But I am a programmer now. Compilers tell you right away when they don't understand.
I know I saw "confusions" right after I hit submit! ha!
True, but they can be profoundly bad at telling you *what* they don't understand. Of course, that's usually the programmer's fault, but unfortunately, the coders least likely to distill meaning from build errors are the most likely to make them.
Now that we're incredibly off-topic...
If there a Bulwer-Lytton style competition for legal writing?
Yes they is.