Consider the quality of the work you produce in English.
Derek nodded off during the afternoon session
Anyone, who would like to produce reasonably representative examples of the prose of business contracts, legal opinions or any other piece of appropriate legal communication might like to be aware of the following points:
- Your writing needs to be clear, concise and connected. Examine the language you have already produced and simplify it. Shorten it. You will be able to remove between 15% and 20% comfortably, without damaging the text and without changing or clouding the meaning.
- Examine your work for signs of phrases, passages of text and single words that are too closely translated from your own mother tongue. Remember, what your own language might sometimes say in 35 words, English may well say in 25 or 30. You can guarantee also that the shape of the sentence will almost certainly be different, occasionally radically so.
- Examine the tone of the article. Does it match correspondence coming in the opposite direction? Does it contain unnecessary contractions? Is it conversational in tone and in shape? Does it sound hurried, disinterested, informal, impolite?
- Does your work contain examples of pomposity or archaic phrases? Although legal English has every right to hold onto its weighty, serious tone, it also has every right – or a duty, in fact – to keep up with the modern world and the way that the modern world communicates.
- Find legal writers, journalists and novelists, whose style you admire. Copy, adapt or steal phrases and words that you hear or read and think may add something positive to your own English.
- Read more. By choosing your English language sources carefully, you will surround yourself with good language use. Soon this will become the norm for you and you will find your own language use improving.
- Care about what you produce. One badly worded email will not bring the wheels of industry to a halt, but – as my Grandmother always said – if it is worth doing, it is worth doing well. As we all agree, grandmothers invariably know what they are talking about.
- Set time limits for work in English. An email that would take you three minutes in your own language should not take you an hour in English. Think clearly. Prepare yourself properly. Make a plan. Check thoroughly. Use online resources like Google, Wikipedia, Dictionaries and a reliable thesaurus.
- Legalese can be a like fog: impenetrably thick, with reduced vision. Modernise and simplify your language. Make it easy to read and easy to follow. Many disputes have their roots in over-complicated contract language for example.
- Cut and paste. With care and precision, examples of good practice, texts that you are particularly proud of, emails that have had the desired effect, should be used time and time again, but with careful pruning and great vigilance for the changing of important details. In a world where time costs money, there is no need to reinvent the wheel every time you sit down to write an email.
- Put some of these ideas into practice and see what effect they have.
English for Law 