Make yourself a solemn promise right now that you’ll never use emolument when you mean tip and you’ll never say ‘John stopped long enough to perform an act of excretion’; when you mean ‘John stopped long enough to take a shit’. If you believe your audience would consider ‘take a shit’ offensive or inappropriate, feel free to say ‘John stopped long enough to move his bowels’.²⁷

Include rather than exclude the reader

It takes courage to be adventurous and go outside the comfort zone of usual legal discourse. Consider this extract from a USA law firm’s home page.²⁸

Powers Phillips is somewhat peculiar in that six of its lawyers are, to put it most politely, uppity women, who through various shenanigans and underhanded schemes control the firm. However, this has not resulted in undue hardship on the male lawyers who are generously allowed a five-minute coffee break every other day (so long as they continue to ponder client matters and continue billing accordingly).

At first I wondered whether this was a real firm or someone sending up legal firms? And then I read the disclaimer:

Important Notice: How to tell if you are a complete idiot

This homepage is intended to be a joke. Other parts of the website are also intended to be jokes. However, as a public service to enable our readers to determine whether or not they are complete idiots, we have also included a bunch of boring, serious material without a joke in sight.

If you can tell the difference, you are not a complete idiot. Just to show we are not completely heartless, we will give you a little hint to help you with this test; if your eyes start to glaze over, it’s the serious, boring stuff. Good luck.

And the more I thought about it, I wondered whether it wasn’t doing the right thing. It was speaking to the readers in a style that they would identify with - it included rather than excluded them.

READERSHIP

Engage the reader

Most readers would prefer reading the Power Phillips home page than one that tries to market a law firm in a serious tone - it’s like the choice between reading a Scott Turow novel and High Court judgment. Also, the home page’s self-deprecating style of humour is appealing. Words like ‘uppity’, ‘shenanigans’, ‘gaze over’ and ‘idiot’ get the message across effectively, without being offensive or patronising. They engage the reader in the writer’s good humour. A traditional approach would be to use ‘safer’ words - those readers would expect from a law firm (dare I say ‘legalese’). But studies have shown that:

… people will do almost anything to avoid reading legalese.²⁹