Book Review: Write You Are

(A review of Diana J. Simon’s book, The (Not Too Serious) Grammar, Punctuation & Style Guide to Legal Writing. Carolina Academic Press. 2022.)

As lawyers we all do it. Whether a little or a lot, we all do it. It’s pretty much part of the job description. I refer to writing, not to seeing the world askance – or even to telling the truth but telling it slant, as Emily Dickinson might say. Diana Simon has written the best and only book you need to get what you write right. That it is fun to read is a bonus.

In a better world, law students would enter their new world as fully formed and technically proficient writers. Law professors could then do to them what they will, unable to corrupt the ordered, intellectual honest life which good writers use as a hedge against the world.

Good writing – being a good writer – matters, generally and especially in the world of law. How to be better at writing? How to be a good writer? These are the most pressing questions for practitioners. Diana Simon’s book offers real help on the first question and helps bring us into the world of the good writer as a way of answering the second.

Diana Simon is one of us. Before turning to teaching writing at the University of Arizona College of Law, she had a long career in Los Angeles as an entertainment lawyer, first working at Bryan Cave and then becoming a partner at Rosenfeld Meyer & Susman. That she has done what we do matters, partly for the wisdom of her perspective and partly for knowing the audience we know: judges and their persnickety persistence on demanding rule-abiding prose.

Simon enters a crowded market – lots of entries, few successes. There are general books on good writing, such as H.W. Fowler’s. He uses an alphabetically arranged list of topics and pithy, witty definitions and explications to describe his world of good writing. Mary Norris, the famed Comma Queen of The New Yorker, takes the chapter approach and takes the reader on tours of her topics based on a lifetime of reading and editing to describe hers. For the busy lawyer, though, Fowler and Norris are both too little and too much.

It’s getting it right which matters most for Simon. The good news is that if we just do as she says we’ll be fine, producing the workmanlike product your audience wants. In her slender book she covers all the areas we need to know about to satisfy even the strictest critics. She writes without the haughtiness that some lawyers writing about legal writing revel in. Instead, there is humor in her writing, both in tone, instruction, and even chapter headings, such as “Semicolons Are Like Kale: Some Writers Like Them and Some Don’t, But They are Good for You if You Know How to Use Them.” This helps embed the rules in our writing brains to give us the surefootedness we want to make life easier.

She considers the usual suspects. She devotes chapters or subchapters to topics such as dashes and hyphens, serial commas, apostrophes, and parentheticals. She also covers grammatical rules governing parallelism and complete sentences. To lighten the load, she goes well beyond the rules themselves. She gives, for example, some nice historical context to the dreaded comma splice, none of which, by the way, frees us from following the most fundamental rule of all of not joining two main clauses with only a comma. (In my days teaching English at the University of Connecticut, one comma splice failed the paper.) She implies that lawyers, even if they at one time knew the rules they should write by, need help with them now.

I can go a bit beyond Simon and suggest that all writing is about audience and honesty. The basic rule to know your audience has special meaning for lawyers writing for judges. Lawyers know that there is nothing special about judges as lawyers – or as people – and that any of us could be one. This makes it wonderfully easy for us to know what judges want to see in briefs and motions. We just have to imagine ourselves in the role of the judge looking to decide a dispute. It’s all so obvious. We would want clarity and concision, to be sure, but what we really want is for the lawyers to give us their best arguments but also to acknowledge the strengths of opposing arguments and respond to them with intellectual honesty. “Don’t mess me about,” we should be able to hear the judges saying as they read their submissions.

If in writing we kept the interests of our judicial audience in mind we would never submit the briefs and motions lawyers are far too often known for. We would not obfuscate, distort, distract, mislead, lie, or generally punt on our obligation to participate, taking the “let the judge figure it out” position. We would not, to put it differently, take the lazy route featuring an indifference to the interests of the audience.

Good writing, we need to acknowledge, is the proving ground of good lawyering. It embraces the collaborative judicial process and insists that lawyers assume a certain modesty in their role in that process. The writing requires it. Otherwise, lawyers become just propagandists in their submissions. If we go that way, we lose ourselves.

So for lawyers it all comes down to the writing. There’s the intellectual honesty I’ve been describing, but there is also – in an equally important way – the nuts and bolts of good writing which Diana Simon describes in her book. Here, too, honesty helps make a point.

Here’s a test. Can you identify all the bits of grammar, punctuation, and style I’ve used in this review? Can you recite the rules controlling those bits. Come on, be honest. If you can’t, then you need to read Diana Simon’s book. Really!