Rewriting as rethinking, presenting, line-editing and nit-picking
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.
Given that “grammer” was an intentional mistake, was “worth working at” also an intentional _mistake_? “At which it is worth working”- do you think employment judges would prefer the latter, or think the former was “shorter, simpler and more direct”? One might think, ooh, preposition at the end of a sentence, does not know what he is talking about, res ipsa loquitur- but then, now we should not use Latin, should we split infinitives?
Propositions at the end of sentences, are, of course, something up with which we should not put.
But I would boldly go on splitting infinitives.