Legal Document Writing with Stylewriter Plain English Software

“Lawyers have two common failings.  One is that they do not write well and the other is that they think they do.”

Carl Felsenfeld

Legal writing is typically full of mammoth sentences, archaic language and standard phrases making it difficult to understand.  Legal writing isn’t read just by lawyers but by the general public.  Too many people have to read consumer agreements, loan applications and insurance policies that are unintelligible.  Legal writing like this not only causes problems of understanding but gives an organisation a poor reputation in the way it treats its customers.

If you write legal documents of any kind, you should try to write in plain English.  When you select Legal Writing as your writing task, StyleWriter adjusts its statistical measures to take account of the difficulties of writing a readable legal document.

	Style Index	Average Sentance	Passive Index	Long Sentance Limit
Excellent Range	0-30	15-20	0-40	40

Here are some suggestions to help you redraft your documents into good, readable English that readers can understand.

1.    Avoid archaic language.
2.    Avoid foreign terms.
3.    Avoid long sentences – break them up into shorter sentences.
4.    Punctuate accurately to make meaning clear.
5.    Make as many verbs active as you can.
6.    Use dot points or numbering to break up a long sentence containing a list of conditions or terms.
7.    If you are writing for a general audience, keep the language simple and clear.
8.    Use you, your and other personal pronouns as much as you can.

9.    Use questions as headings to break up information and to guide the reader.
10.    Put yourself in the reader’s position to make sure the writing is understandable.
11.    Test out your writing on a non-legal audience to see if they understand the meaning.
12.    Don’t let another lawyer redraft your writing into legalese.

StyleWriter Plain English Writing Software will help you to write in plain English, but you must keep a commitment to clear writing.  It’s not always easy to explain complex ideas simply but if you do, you will save many people time, money and frustration.

Plain English Writing Task Styles in Stylewriter

This entry was posted on June 13th, 2010 and is filed under Writing Task Styles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.