Legalwriting.net continues dialog about poor writing by attorneys

Over at Wayne Schiess's legal writing blog, Legalwriting.net (which isn't exactly found at Legalwriting.net), Wayne continues the discussion about nominalizations and how they are slowly killing the English language.  The most recent post (which provides an opportunity for me to give myself a gratuitous pat on the back), Wayne highlights a prior comment left by yours truly on the thesis that fear is responsible for poor writing:

“I think much of the problem (to the extent it is one) with legal writing is that it is based upon fear.

Young lawyers fear being wrong. They fear error as though to err is fatal (maybe fatal to your career, but not life-threatening). To limit the chance that they are wrong, young lawyers turn to qualifiers and equivocations. An outgrowth of writing in this way is the difficulty with writing in a strong and direct manner. It is very hard to use powerful action verbs when every sentence contains multiple escape clauses. Lawyers seem to believe, especially in litigation, that they can always salvage the argument or position, so long as there is a way to change their position with mushy language.

How often do lawyers write junk like, "Having evaluated your contentions and considered the applicable authority, it is evident that your client's position is unsustainable," when they could just say, "Your client's interpretation is wrong"? Fear.

The really good writers in the legal field have embraced their fear and just state their position with the confidence that, win or lose, clarity and certainty are better than weakness.

I don't actually know how I cite to Wayne Schiess's blog where he quotes my comment left to a prior post on his blog.  I guess that will do.

If you haven't already noticed, there is a link to Wayne's blog in the blogroll contained in the right column.  Again, class actions and complex cases in general are bad enough without sinking under the weight of bad written advocacy.