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November 11, 2006In-House NewsIn a potentially positive development for B.D. readers, I find myself randomly re-reading this book. Why some of you who regularly point your browsers here might be pleased to hear I'm dusting it off is well apparent from the very first paragraph of Chapter 1: We lawyers do not write plain English. We use eight words to say what could be said in two. We use arcane phrases to express commonplace ideas. Seeking to be precise, we become redundant. Seeking to be cautious, we become verbose. Our sentences twist on, phrase within clause within clause, glazing the eyes and numbing the minds of our readers. The result is a writing style that has, according to one critic, four outstanding characteristics. It is "(1) wordy, (2) unclear, (3) pompous, and (4) dull." Guilty as charged, I'm afraid! Posted by Gregory at November 11, 2006 03:27 AMComments
that's funny notice how brief that was :) Posted by: napablogger at November 11, 2006 03:53 AM | Permalink to this comment
yes guy but i really do think it's something of a professional deformation for us types w/ legal backgrounds. i often find myself writing a sentence, and then as a corporate lawyer might, thinking of various shades of gray, carve-outs, exceptions, etc. As I try to capture these, it's suddenly now two or three clauses later, with the sentence having grown to unwieldy size. while I feel I may have captured the perceived ambiguities that troubled me, I've likely also lost many of my readers to the 'glaze' factor mentioned above! such is life... Posted by: greg djerejian at November 11, 2006 04:12 AM | Permalink to this comment
If anyone's interested, it's not just in law. One of my friends, who works on training people for public presentations, complains about it. He says academics invariably start talking using dependant clauses and qualifiers. I think it's a hang-over from how researchers are trained to think. And the scholastic method. Posted by: tzs at November 11, 2006 05:05 AM | Permalink to this comment
Mr. Djerejian's prose has some faults, it's true. It's true for most of the rest of us, too. I'm a history Ph.D and I've read a lot of European history. And, frankly, historians are, on average, awful writers. Really, really, awful. But of all the sins Mr. Djerejian might commit with his prose, I think he rarely offends against #2 (unclear prose). There might be a few too many words a few too many times, but his meaning is almost always quite clear. That must be worth something. An A for effort, perhaps? Posted by: stickler at November 11, 2006 05:53 AM | Permalink to this comment
this must be stickler's polite way of telling me my writing is wordy, pompous and dull! Posted by: greg djerejian at November 11, 2006 06:04 AM | Permalink to this comment
BTW, is there some sort of exception from these principles that apply to blogs? And, from a layperson's viewpoint, as to the writing offenses outlined above, I would adjudge Greg Djerejian "not guilty" on charges (2), (3), and (4) - and take a plea bargain on charge (1)! Posted by: Jay C at November 11, 2006 03:44 PM | Permalink to this comment
this must be stickler's polite way of telling me my writing is wordy, pompous and dull! Dull? No. Especially the last few weeks. On the other points, I have no comment. Posted by: stickler at November 11, 2006 04:44 PM | Permalink to this comment
Not all historians suck, though it seems to me the ones that are most pleasurable to read are often put down by their colleagues as writing for a popular audience rather than a scholarly one. I'd love to find someone as marvelous as Tuchman. Any suggestions? I have to confess, my best sources of historical information are generally novelists writing historical fiction, or writing genre fiction set in other times. Vidal, Renault, Costain, Graves, Heyer (yes, really), Carr, Saylor, Peters, Ford, Lofts - all of them and more made the eras and milieus they wrote about more immediate, real and interesting than "serious historical scholars" ever could. Possibly because they were writing for a lay audience, and knew they had to craft an interesting story. Posted by: CaseyL at November 11, 2006 10:53 PM | Permalink to this comment
wordy perhaps, but quite elegant... Posted by: constate at November 12, 2006 03:07 AM | Permalink to this comment
Not all historians suck, though it seems to me the ones that are most pleasurable to read are often put down by their colleagues as writing for a popular audience rather than a scholarly one. I'd love to find someone as marvelous as Tuchman. Tuchman was rare in combining popular appeal with a historical conscience; cf. her note in The Guns of August on how she's not going to do the "As he looked over the battlefield, N. must have thought about ..." style of writing. Compare to Anthony Everett, whose new book on Augustus I found unreadable from the very introduction, where he commits the vice Tuchman inveighed against in the course of inventing a new theory of Augustus's demise. If the man *wants* to write a novel, then damn, he should write one. "Very pretty, Mr. Everett, but you must not call it history." Posted by: Anderson at November 12, 2006 04:40 PM | Permalink to this comment
To those lamenting the writing skills of lawyers and historians, have you ever read political scientists or economists? Talk about bad writing. Posted by: Charlie at November 13, 2006 09:03 PM | Permalink to this comment
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