Quick writing fixes: sentence logic, compound adjectives, hidden redundancy, and action verbs
A point heading I recently revised illustrates four techniques recommended in Elegant Legal Writing.
Here’s a point heading I recently revised in a draft litigation filing. My revision illustrates four techniques recommended in Elegant Legal Writing:
Check your sentences’ logic.
Simplify and hyphenate compound adjectives.
Tighten your sentences by rooting out hidden redundancy.
Use action verbs.
First, the original heading:
The Court should review this petition because there is a split of authority in the appellate districts about the payment or performance factors requirement.
That heading appeared in an early draft of a petition for review asking the Supreme Court of California to grant discretionary review of a decision by a lower court (the Fifth District Court of Appeal). The legal issue involved the collateral-order doctrine, which allows some orders in a lawsuit to be appealed even if the lawsuit remains ongoing.
As background, California’s intermediate appellate courts are divided into “Districts,” which are analogous to the “Circuits” in federal appellate courts.
Check your sentences’ logic.
Check each sentence’s logic. A petition for review doesn’t ask the court to “review this petition”; every submitted petition will be reviewed. That’s what the court does when it reads the petition and decides whether to grant the requested relief. Instead, a petition for review asks the court to grant the petition, allowing the petitioner to argue that the lower court’s decision should be overturned.
Here’s the heading after implementing this first revision:
The Court should grant this petition because there is a split of authority in the appellate districts about the payment or performance factors requirement.
Simplify and hyphenate compound adjectives.
Second, simplify and hyphenate compound adjectives. Compound adjectives (sometimes called phrasal adjectives) are groups of words that work together to modify the following noun phrase.1 Hyphenating these helps the reader parse the sentence more easily by clarifying how words should be grouped.
In the example above, “the payment or performance factors requirement” can be revised to “the payment-or-performance requirement.” Here’s the heading after implementing the first two revisions:
The Court should grant this petition because there is a split of authority in the appellate districts about the payment-or-performance requirement.
Note that Grammarly wrongly flags “payment-or-performance” as an error, showing that revision software is imperfect; you should consider its suggestions but use your judgment to decide which to accept.
Tighten your sentences by rooting out hidden redundancy.
The heading can be made more concise by removing the phrase “The Court should grant this petition,” as that contention is supplied by context and inherent in the filing. After all, the purpose of a petition for review is to ask a court to grant the petition. Here’s the next version of the heading:
There is a split of authority in the appellate districts about the payment-or-performance requirement.
Use action verbs.
Finally, here’s an even better version of the heading. This final version replaces the static verb is with the action verb disagree, making the heading more lively and following Joseph Williams’ advice to write about “characters performing actions” (see ELW § 4.4):
The appellate districts disagree about whether the collateral-order doctrine includes a payment-or-performance requirement.
Ryan McCarl is a founding partner of Rushing McCarl LLP and author of Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024). For more writing tips, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing newsletter and follow Ryan on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is available on Amazon.
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A phrase consists of one or more words that operate as a unit, but unlike a clause, a phrase lacks a subject, verb, or both. Example noun phrases include “lawyer,” “law firm,” and “court of appeals”; example verb phrases include “run” and “went running.”