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16 Scribes J. Leg. Writing 69 (2015)
The Lawyer's Struggle to Write

handle is hein.journals/scrib16 and id is 77 raw text is: The Lawyer's Struggle to Write Matthew R. Salzwedel Writing is hard work.... If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. - William Zinsserl A college senior who's completing her honors project on the topic of legal writing recently asked me to explain why so many lawyers struggle to write well. At first, I was flattered. Then I thought that her project was too ambitious and that others could give her better advice. After all, legal-writing experts such as Bryan Garner, Joseph Kimble, and Ross Guberman have dedicated careers to diagnosing the causes of poor legal writing. But I agreed to give my take on the subject for three reasons. First, as Irving Younger said, Lawyers should acknowledge a professional obligation to wage war against bad writing.2 Sec- ond, when people care about writing well (or, for that matter, care about doing anything well), they deserve to be encouraged. Third, it's about time I fess up about how my struggle to write well informs my views on why many lawyers don't. Who Needs This Nonsense? I grew up hating English class. My parents, though well educated, didn't come from English or writing backgrounds, so I cared little about whether I could properly split infinitives or end sentences with prepositions or begin sentences with coor- dinating conjunctions. These topics just didn't come up during dinner chatter, and they certainly weren't the subject of intense ' William Zinsser, On Writing Well 12 (6th ed. 1998). 2 Irving Younger, Symptoms of Bad Writing, A.B.A. J., May 1986, at 113, 113.

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