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WRITING GUIDELINES:
GENERAL PRINCIPLES & RULES OF THUMB
Professor David Post
These guidelines are divided into “general principles” and “rules of thumb.” The general principles are for you to think about; the rules of thumb are for you to obey blindly.
The General Principles
1. “Good prose is like a windowpane.” (Orwell) The point of legal writing is to make the complicated simple, not the other way around.
2. “Your language becomes clear and strong not when you can no longer add, but when you can no longer take away.” (Isaac Babel)
3. To be a good writer you must learn to be a good reader. Read the cases. Read more of them, and read the ones that you have read over again.
4. Legal documents are not book reports; they are persuasive documents; they answer some question, and they persuade the reader that the answer is the correct one.
5. Let the process of writing help you think.
6. You will not learn to write well by talking – to me, or to anyone else – about writing; you will learn to write well by writing.
7. Give yourself time.
8. There is no “A for Effort” when it comes to written work.
9. Revise, revise, revise.
10. Everything you put on the page matters.
The Rules of Thumb
1. Write your Introduction LAST.
2. Use topic sentences.
3. Eliminate the passive voice from your papers.
4. Quote first; explain later.
5. Do not thump on the table; eliminate the words “clearly,” and “obviously,” and “undoubtedly,” and the like from your writing.
6. Use parallel structure.
7. Eliminate unnecessary introductory and transition words (such as “Moreover,” “In addition,” “Furthermore,” “As such,” “Notwithstanding,” and the like).
8. Watch out for “as explained below” and “as explained above.”
9. Read your work aloud.
