Lawyers are bad writers

Writing like a lawyer for over twenty five years had clogged my system with literary cholesterol. I was never a fan of legal jargon - you won't get a "hereinafter" out of me - but years of legal writing made Jaitly a dull scribe. Giving legal advice, or drafting a contract, requires words to have unambiguous meanings: millions can hinge on their interpretation. This tends to lead to dry and clunky writing.

Lawyers who write well exist, but are rare. The American lawyer and lexicographer Bryan Garner believes that the pervasiveness of the Dunning-Kruger effect in the legal profession is responsible for lawyers being bad writers. This means that lawyers write badly but believe that they write well. Whether this is the main cause or not (I have witnessed many cases of D-K at work), most writing by lawyers is pretty ghastly.

Poorly written court judgements, bad statutory drafting and inadequate attention to legal writing in law schools contribute. In an unhelpful cycle, lawyers are expected to produce unreadable legal sounding stuff, and they do, and so it goes on. This is bad in a legal setting, worse still out of a legal context.

But the problem is not intractable. Stepping away from the daily practice of law, I wanted to write more engagingly for a wider audience. I read books and articles about good writing and even took a writing course. The most important lesson I learnt was this: develop a writing habit. I'd been trying and failing to do so, until I discovered Nicheless, perhaps even the day it launched. Its clean look and 300 word limit appealed instantly and off I went, writing 30 pieces in 30 days. The practice has made writing my more formal articles less of a chore (and more readable I hope!).