Personalises legal writing

But other than spelling and grammar mistakes, email is changing the way lawyers write – for the better. Because it’s closer to a telephone conversation than a letter they tend to write the way they speak. And people better understand text if it is written the way it is spoken. For example, ‘it’s’ and ‘there’s are preferable to ‘it is’ and ‘there is’. (Attachment ‘H’)

Writing email messages also makes lawyers personalise their writing.⁴⁸ They usually do not say in their everyday conversations ‘please do not hesitate to contact me if you have further queries.’ They might say ‘ give me a call if you’re not sure.’ And stiff sentence openers such as ‘Similarly’, ‘However, ‘Consequently’ and ‘Inasmuch’ are being replaced by more conversational ones such as ‘And’, ‘But’ and ‘So’.

And the more lawyers write emails like this, the more easily they will slip into this style in conventional ‘snail mail’ letter writing. Recently, I was glad to receive an email from a lawyer with the salutation: ‘G’day Tim’. Hopefully I’ll soon be receiving them with openers and closures such as ‘Cooee’ and ‘hooroo’ (colloquial Australian ways of saying ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’). These words, once considered slang are now in Australian dictionaries. So why not use them when appropriate? They give more flavour than the insincere ‘Dear’ ‘Regards’ or ‘Best wishes’.

WRITING TOOLBOXES

Whatever happened to grammar?

One of the biggest complaints by Sparke Helmore partners about junior lawyers’ writing is their lack of attention to detail and incorrect grammar:

…lawyers can achieve success in school and in some areas of practice without learning how to write well.⁴⁹

Many young lawyers haven’t been taught grammar at school (or even if they have they’ve conveniently forgotten it). Teaching grammar in Australian schools for the past 20 years was discouraged because it might hurt the feelings of lower socio-economic groups if they were criticised for the way they spoke. Accordingly, primary and secondary students were educated with the laissez – faire attitude that all that matters is to get the message across. That’s all very well but some young lawyers write letters that read like the literary equivalents of Jackson Pollack paintings.

Developing writing toolboxes

Thankfully grammar is now being taught again in Australian schools. But that’s too late for a whole generation who missed out on it. And while its presumptuous for me to start teaching grammar to twenty and thirty year old university graduates, I can help them to develop their writing toolboxes. For this I was inspired by Stephen King’s analogy of his grandfather’s carpenters toolbox – something he carried around with him in case he needed a tool for the unexpected.⁵⁰