Guide to Legal Writing Style

By Terri LeClercq

Book Overview

This concise paperback focuses on the nuances of legal writing style and provides novice legal writers with the skills they need to polish their writing. Guide to Legal Writing Style, Fourth Edition, intended as an ancillary to any basic legal writing text, expands what students learn in their first-year courses by providing additional techniques and style tips that will help make their writing more precise, readable and elegant.

This highly regarded paperback, specifically directed at legal writers, offers

crisp, pointed advice written in a personal and humorous style lucid organization that helps students find the information they need most, including practice with basic skills and helpful advice on organization, sentence structure, word choice, punctuation, and formatting an emphasis on legal ethics throughout, with most of the examples and exercises focusing on ethical issues a chapter on organization that compares and contrasts undergraduate terms and goals with those expected by a legal audience a guide that helps students guard against plagiarism short, end-of-chapter exercises, with the answers at the back of the book, that strengthen skills and provide opportunities for self-testing

Special features in the Fourth Edition include: an updated interactive CD-ROM with multiple exercises to reinforce the materials in the book, which includes updated and expanded tests of basic skills and click-on answers and explanations a new chapter testing common errors in professional writing, with explanations as well as succinct answers new checklists that reinforce essential advice of each chapter

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 073559998X
• ISBN13: 9780735599987
• Release Date: February 2011
• Publisher: Aspen Publishing
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Strunk and White for Law Students

I am not a law student. I bought this book because I needed to work with a team of lawyers and testing specialists to create a writing assessment for Federal attorneys. I needed an introduction to legal writing that helped me understand the style and the ways that style could go wrong so I could ask my team members intelligent questions and turn the answers into an employment test. I bought this book and another big, fat, expensive one on judicial opinion writing. This one helped the most. Terri LeClercq's book presents the basics of writing and the law. The book's strength is the repeated "here's the problem, now here's the solution" structure that helps readers identify and correct common problems. The chapters are concise, well-written--as one would hope--and useable as references while writing or editing. The concluding exercises for each chapter with model answers at the end of the book allow practice with as much feedback as is possible without a live teacher. The CD is a useful addition to the third edition. This reader- and student-friendly book is sure to improve the writing style of law students and practicing attorneys. It's an excellent extension of the basic writing principles found in the classic The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. You can also blame it for helping to make one government employment test a little tougher.

This is a "must have" book!

I have several of Terri's books, including the earlier edition of this one. But with this edition, Terri has added a CD-Rom that really makes a difference. There are a lot of really good legal writing books out there, but I think Terri's are exemplary. For anyone who is interested in legal writing or who wants to improve their writing skills, buy this book.