Are you thinking about your readers when you write?
When teaching legal writing, I ask lawyers to think about the purpose of their writing: why are you writing this email, letter, or document, and who is going to read it? This should help you to choose appropriate language that your reader can understand.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously said, ‘My eye is on the reader’*. My brother’s lawyers clearly did not have their eye on the reader when they wrote an email to him about his house sale. My brother said, ‘it annoys me when they talk ‘legal’ and I haven’t a clue what they are talking about’.
The email contained a number of questions about my brother’s house. To give you a flavour of the writing, here is one of the questions:
‘Please confirm you have observed and performed all of the covenants contained in the title and are not aware of any breach of the same. We enclose the Register of Title and Conveyance which contain the covenants.’
Who says ‘the same’ in ordinary English language? It is a lawyer’s way of referring to something mentioned earlier, without having to repeat it. Here, it means ‘the covenants’. In plain English you could just say ‘them’.
But more importantly, what does ‘covenants’ mean? And what does ‘breach’ of the covenants mean? Maybe my brother could work that out by looking at the Register of Title and Conveyance. I have not reproduced these documents but I can tell you that the Conveyance is dated 1893 and contains only 1 covenant. However, that covenant is a sentence of 380 words (32 lines) long, with no punctuation! Surely it is a lawyer’s job to explain that covenant in language that the client can understand?
The writer of the email was a trainee solicitor. My feeling is that the trainee had simply copied the questions from the buyer’s lawyers directly into the email to my brother. Here are some tips I would pass on:
Do not blindly copy someone else’s writing: adapt your writing to your reader and avoid the perpetuation of legalese.
Read your writing aloud: you will soon see how strange ‘the same’ sounds.
Test your writing: ask someone who is not a lawyer to read it. If they can’t understand it, maybe you should change it.
*Interviews with United States Supreme Court Justices, The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing, 2010, at page 134.