Well, I just wanted to register discomfort with notions like "how bad...
lawyerly language is" or "bad legal language" as in Bill Murdick's
contribution..
 
 
>The book LIVING LANGUAGES edited by Nancy Buffington et al.contains
>an essay entitled "The Invisible Discourse of the Law."  A good
>way to introduce grammar to lawyers, I would think, would be to have
>them read such essays which show how sneaky and bad lawyerly
>language is. And to study the grammar of bad legal language.
>
 
_________
Language is not bad in and of itself; it may be ineffective in achieving an
intended goal.
 
These attorneys clearly know the grammar of their language, so it's not a
matter of teaching them grammar.
 
More likely and more user-friendly would be to work on identifying how
legal language makes problems for the intended audience.  Of course, then
you have to know who that audience is. Perhaps if the audience is other
lawyers, then there is no problem. But when the audience is the lay public,
there's where you get into problems.
 
I would think that the standard textbooks on technical writing would
identify the main culprits making comprehension more difficult:  long
nominalizations of verbs turned into nouns with many pre-nominal modifiers;
lots of passive voice with deleted agents; stacked prepositional phrases;
hefty use of abstractions, without adequate examples. Though legal language
surely has its distinctive traits.
 
But, seems to me, that a more productive approach to the attorneys would be
to create a situation where they can EXPERIENCE the differences between a
typically legal sentence, and one in say, "Plain English".
 
One technique I've used is to read a convoluted sentence aloud to a class,
and then ask them to tell me what I just said.  Typically, they can't. Then
I read them an unpacked version, that is in "Plain English", and ask them
to tell me what I just said.  They typically can. Then we contrast what it
was that made the difference, and they do the learning themselves.
 
the benefit about this is that I've not told them what they're doing is
bad. Instead, they've experienced that its harder one way, and easier
another, and they do the discovery themselves, thus defusing resentment,
etc.
 
ciao,
 
rebecca wheeler
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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                        Rebecca S. Wheeler, Ph.D.
 
                        [log in to unmask]
 
                        Department of English
                        Weber State University
                        Ogden, UTah 84408-1201
                                         USA
 
(Ogden is 30 miles or so north of Salt Lake City, Utah)
 
office phone:  (801) 626-6257           home phone:    (801) 563-0533
office fax:    (801) 626-7760           local fax:     (801) 563-6620
                                         (fax, attn: Rebecca Wheeler)
 
 
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