The difficult part was pitching the story to an audience and panel of literary experts – in five minutes. My story, about the lives of a group of residents in an inner city block of units, was complicated. They went to bed one night in a suburb called Bondi Junction and woke up the next morning in another called Queens Park. Five minutes is a short time to describe the effect of the word ‘queen’ on different people, as well as the joys and miseries of communal living.

Plain English helped shorten the pitch

A friend, experienced in plain English, helped me shorten the pitch. She, a non-lawyer, helped me realise that my writing was unnecessarily long and complicated. I had to swallow my pride - like most solicitors I don’t take kindly to criticism of my writing. But she made me realise that without plain English I could never tell it in five minutes. I had the ideas and the humour but it took me too long to state them. I was the casualty of thirty years of legal study and practice:

Somewhere along the way to becoming a lawyer, most lawyers develop their work voice and they use that voice for nearly everything they write – no matter how inappropriate the work voice is to the audience and purpose of the document.¹⁸

Lawyers are storytellers

My story telling, after plain English review, was lively, humorous and, most importantly, short! Admittedly, it’s not so easy (or appropriate at times) for lawyers to inject humour and creativity in legal writing. But it does allow them to speak to their readers in a lively and engaging tone. And lawyers do not realise how good they are at storytelling. They are crafting narratives all the time, especially in court or even sitting around the negotiating table or mediating.¹⁹

In fact, many modern academics have urged lawyers to use the storytelling technique to give voice to their legal discourse. They urge them to think about how their language operates.²⁰ Their language is bound up with power and the more it is used as a means to exercise that power the less appropriate it will be to the audience’s needs. Instead, storytelling allows lawyers to deliver informative, engaging and understandable narratives.

THE CRAFT OF WRITING

Craft to be learned

The audience reacted well to my pitch - at least they laughed in the right places. The judges must have also liked it as they awarded me third place. It confirmed that, regardless of many years of legal writing, the complexities of legal language hadn’t ‘deadened my writing’ and ‘drained me of creativity’.²¹