So why not surprise them with the unexpected? The Power Phillips discourse is closer to colloquial language and the way people speak with one another. Some people say that everything a person writes is a conversation they have with their readers. So it’s important to draw the reader into what they have to say and

‘…trim and edit and polish it until it sings’.³⁰

Lawyers don’t’ have to sing but they should probably try reading their prose aloud to see whether they’d actually say it the way they’ve written it.³¹ Putting the reader into the writing with a natural spoken style gives the reader the sense that the writer is talking directly to them:

To the legal reader, few things are more pleasing than the sense that a writer is talking directly to you. It’s so unusual that it can be genuinely refreshing.³²

Many people don't like reading

Even when lawyers do pay attention to their writing skills they often ignore the reading skills of their audience. But writing and reading skills are intertwined. Teaching law to non-law students helped me realise many people don’t like reading, especially large slabs of text.

Research published in 1995 indicated that 20 percent of adult Australians had difficulties in reading and extracting verbatim information from a newspaper article.³³ The Survey of Aspects of Literacy conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 1996 found that almost half of Australians aged 15-71 (6.2 million) had ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’ prose literary skills.³⁴

Lawyers' literacy arrogance

Lawyers, blessed with good literacy, tend to forget that others aren’t so keen on reading. Richard Beasley in his satirical novel about a large Sydney law firm captures lawyers’ literary arrogance:³⁵

Despite his high intellect and long career at the Bar, Giles Taffy had somehow never managed to learn even the most rudimentary rules of politeness when speaking to an inferior intellect. Inferior intellects comprised at least everyone who was not a High Court or Appeal Court judge. Many of them fell within the definition. Talking to him was like talking to Edward De Bono, but with Liam Gallagher’s personality.

I learned about the Giles Taffy’s of the legal world very early in my career. During my articles I arranged for my master solicitor to act for my mother on a house purchase. He told me to take it home and ask her to read the contract for sale. I dutifully obeyed his instructions and sat proudly while he interviewed my mother as she pulled the contract out of her handbag:

‘Have you read it?’

‘No! That’s what I’m paying you to do.’