Legal Research

The Friday Fillip

By Simon Fodden

or, as I might title it today, “The Good, the Bad, and the American.” And it’s about nothing more contentious than language.

The Good? There are, of course, all sorts of species of “good” in writing. For us in law, one kind of a sometime good is plain language. For decades now, supporters of plain language in law have been urging lawyers to, well, learn to write so that others can understand them easily. Which isn’t easy. The U.S. government has a site replete with examples and tools and a page referring to foreign resources — none of which is Canadian, I point out. Our government’s Language Portal of Canada contains a list of links to some plain language tools created by others, but nothing that I could find expressing a plain language policy or offering a guide to writing simply.

The Bad? I can never resist a trip to the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (“where WWW means ‘wretched writers welcome’”). There’s a plenitude of categories of poor prose, and I’ll leave you to pore over the poor at your leisure, only quoting two examples here:

That from Scott Davis Jones, winner of the (worst? best?) purple prose:

The dark, drafty old house was lopsided and decrepit, leaning in on itself, the way an aging possum carrying a very heavy, overcooked drumstick in his mouth might list to one side if he were also favoring a torn Achilles tendon, assuming possums have them.

And Mary Ann R Unger’s effort in the historical fiction category:

In Southwestern Germany just east of the Luxemburg border and north of France where history pitted various related Hapsburg Royals against each other and the Archbishops of Trier, the Abbots of St. Maximin, various members of the nobility, and mobs of axe-bearing villagers, there stands a ruin whose building stones mostly were carted off to build other buildings.

I’ve suggested before, to no applause, that we should sponsor our own prize for bad legal writing. I still think it’s a good idea, but perhaps an impossibly difficult job choosing.

Now for the American. The Economist, whose Johnson I recently pointed you to, has portions of its style guide online, one of which advises its writers to avoid Americanisms, many of which it spells out, offering Englishisms (?) in lieu. Herewith a swath:

In an American context you may run for office (but please stand in countries with parliamentary systems) and your car may sometimes run on gasoline instead of petrol. But if you use corn in the American sense you should explain that this is maize to most people (unless it is an old chestnut). Trains run from railway stations, not train stations. The people in them, and on buses, are passengers, not riders. Cars are hired, not rented. City centres are not central cities. Cricket is a game not a sport.

There is no need to mention, though I will, that the fact of Canada never crosses their minds.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on July 09, 2010 (boomark / email).