• Sleep on it. The problem with editing something you’ve just written is that you are too close to it. You will tend to see what you expect to, rather than what is actually there. Similarly, you are less likely to spot structural problems on a document you have just written. Once a little time has passed, you can come to it fresh.
• Print it out. Editing on screen is something many people find difficult. Most people find it easier to see typos and other problems on paper.
• Use a monospaced font. A monospaced font is one, like Courier, where all the characters occupied the same amount of horisontal space, i.e. like a typewriter or a computer terminal. They are not suitable for finished work, because they look ugly. But some people find it easier to spot mistakes in a monospaced font.
• Give it to someone else. A second opinion is often useful. Someone who does not know the detail of your case is more likely to spot gaps in your argument. And a fresh pair of eyes is more likely to spot mistakes.
• Read it aloud. This is likely to be embarrassing, but is often worth doing anyway. Reading aloud will slow you down, making it easier to spot problems. Also, reading aloud will often show up stylistic problems that are harder to spot when reading.

All of these tips are just suggestions. Use what you find useful and ignore the rest.

If you have any tips of your own, please do share them in the comments.

In Is this the best you can do? we emphasised the important of rewriting and editing.

It’s easy to say that rewriting is important, but harder to explain how to do it. It’s easy to say ‘Get the words right’, but hard to explain what the right words are or how you find them. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be trying to give some helpful guidance.

A good starting point is to recognise that rewriting covers a wide range of different tasks.

Rethinking

Lots of us do a lot of our thinking about cases by writing about them. So rewriting is an excellent time to rethink. On reflection, does your argument make sense? Have you missed something out? Does the witness statement cover all the information it needs to?

Presenting

Once you are confident that you are saying the right things, you can consider whether you are presenting them most effectively. Are you dealing with things the right way and in the right order? Is there a way of making your argument more persuasive?

Line-editing

This is the sentence by sentence work. It means looking at each sentence, each paragraph, and asking ‘Is there a better way of putting this?’ Better, in this context, means shorter, simpler and more direct.

Nit-picking

Finally, you check your spelling, punctuation and grammer. Very few people get this absolutely right all the time, but it is worth working at.

Winston Lord was an aide to Henry Kissinger during the Nixon administration. Once, after Lord had written a draft report, Kissinger asked “Is this the best you can do?” Disheartened, Lord took the report away and redrafted it. Again Kissinger sent it back, saying “Are you sure this is the best you can do?”

He submitted another eight drafts, getting exactly the same reaction each time. Finally, he sent in a ninth. Kissinger called him into his office and asked again, “Is this the best that you can do?”

Lord, by this stage, was more than a little frustrated. He replied “Henry, I’ve beaten my brains out – this is the ninth draft. I know it’s the best I can do: I can’t possibly improve one more word.”

Kissinger looked up from his desk, “In that case,” he said, “now I’ll read it.”

Kissinger sets a bad example for management, but a good example for writing.

Moving complicated ideas from one head to another is hard work. Someone always has to sweat and struggle over it. If you don’t do the hard work when you write, you are leaving it to your reader. The problem is that your reader may not bother.

Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?
Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied.
Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
Hemingway: Getting the words right.

I’ve just read the best advice I’ve ever seen on this subject in Bryan A Garner’s book The Elements of Legal Style (2nd ed., OUP 2002, p.207). It’s worth quoting at some length:

Gender-neutral language isn’t about political correctness; it’s about credibility. Regardless of how you may feel about the old “rule” that the masculine he includes the feminine she – whether you detest it or you like it – you’ll need to handle the English language with some care to have credibility with a wide range of readers.

This isn’t an easy task. On the one hand [some] readers …. will think you’re crazy if you write he/she, s/he, or (s)he. They’ll know you’re crazy if you write – as one book author has – s/he/it. On the other hand, [readers of a different sort] will think you’re a troglodyte if you use he to refer to readers generally – as if the feminine were the unstated exception swept into the masculine rule of our language.

Is there no way to win over your readers, then?

Yes, there is. It takes some skill and a lot of effort. With those two things, you’ll be able to produce a style that never induces readers to consider your personal biases. If your point is that you want to induce this reaction, then you’re rebuffing some of your readers – something you may willingly do unless you have a client whose money and perhaps even freedom are on the line. If you’re trying to persuade someone on a point unrelated to sexist language, then the issue shouldn’t even arise.

Garner goes on to demonstrate various specific techniques: weeding out pronouns (e.g. ‘a claimant in this situation should do this or that’ instead of ‘if a claimant is in this situation, he should do this or that’); pluralising (‘if claimants are in this situation, they should do this or that’); using the 2nd person and imperative voice (‘if you are in this situation, do this or that’); and several others.

But his key insight is that – if you are writing on someone else’s behalf, and seeking to persuade – it doesn’t matter whether the feminists or the troglodytes are right. What matters is that if you side visibly with either, you’ll risk annoying someone. The only way to be reasonably sure not to annoy any reader is to make the issue disappear from sight.

The opposite of ‘unfair’ is ‘fair’. Not ‘not unfair’.

So write “The Respondent has not shown a fair reason for the dismissal”, rather than “The Respondent has not shown a not unfair reason for dismissal”.

Double negatives aren’t necessarily sinful, but they should not be used without care.

Often, while writing, you will leave gaps to fill in later.

It is useful to have a standard bit of text, such as ‘xxx’ to use as a placeholder. Every time you leave a gap, use a placeholder to mark it. Then you can use the ‘find’ or search function to quickly locate the gaps.

This has two useful functions. Firstly, you can quickly find out what you have left to do. Secondly, when you think you are finished, you can check that there is nothing left undone.

Quite a lot of material presented to tribunals is illegible.

There are good reasons for this. Many documents produced out in the real world are written under significant time pressure and in less than ideal circumstances. Notes written during, say, a disciplinary hearing are unlikely to be written in a clear round hand. Particularly if the meeting was tense.

On the other hand, a surprising number of ET1 and ET3′s require a magnifying glass and some time to decode.

If you have bad handwriting it is worth typing as much as possible. If this is not possible, you must just take as long as it takes to produce a legible document.

When dealing with existing documents that are particularly hard to read, the sensible approach is to produce a typed version. In most cases you should be able to agree its accuracy with the Respondent. Even if you can’t, it is worth doing. The tribunal can always check the accuracy against the original if there is a problem.

Intensifiers are adverbs intended to strengthen adjectives.

For example, writing ‘very unfair’ instead of ‘unfair’ should suggest that whatever you are referring to is more than ordinarily unfair. Similarly, you might write ‘extremely unfair’ or ‘astonishingly unfair’.

Unfortunately, due to a quirk of human psychology, this does not work. It actually has the reverse affect. To a reader sentences like:

Their behaviour was extremely unreasonable.
That was very unfair.
I was tremendously upset.

Are less convincing and less strong than:

Their behaviour was unreasonable.
That was unfair.
I was upset.

Most of us have words and phrases that we overuse.

For example, I have a tendency to start sentences with ‘clearly’ when writing submissions: as in ‘Clearly my client is right and should win his case’.

This is not a good idea. Either something is clear or it isn’t. If it is, it doesn’t need saying. If it isn’t, suggesting that it is will hinder rather than help. Even if, occasionally, ‘clearly’ is useful, overusing it is distracting and annoying.

So, during the editing phase, I go through and take out most of the ‘clearly’s

Different people have different ticks. It is worth figuring out what yours are and keeping an eye on them.

One of points made by the last post is that legal writing should be short.

The post itself is a good example of how much can be lost from most first drafts. The first attempt was 124 words. By judicious pruning and removing one unnecessary sentence it was cut to 78 words.