Structure and focus

Bryan Garner's LawProse Lesson #214:

Lawyers’ biggest failing as writers.

What’s the most pervasive flaw among legal writers? It’s the tendency to begin writing before fully understanding the message to be conveyed. Lawyers often don’t think through what they want to say until they’re already writing—and they therefore meander, backtrack, and even restart. Unless they spend a great deal of time rewriting and cutting, they end up submitting something verbose, rambling, repetitious, incohesive, and unpersuasive.

The mature writer first figures out the major propositions and then writes in support of them. The resulting product has both an overt structure and a strong focus.

This method of writing isn’t inborn; it’s learned. With some patience and humility, anyone can learn to do it.

Sometimes I use writing to explore ideas. That counts as "writing before fully understanding the message to be conveyed." Probably unfocused and unpersuasive. But sometimes that's okay.

Actually, for writing about the economy, I count is as a plus if ideas are presented for evaluation rather than crammed down your throat as the hard truth.

It's different for lawyers, I think. Oh, and there are some arguments I make, where I am as focused and convincing as possible. When I'm sure of something and when it's important.

But even the things we're sure of -- especially the things we're sure of -- occasionally need to be reconsidered, thought through again, seen in the light of a changed economy. A changing economy.

William Zinsser: Writing English as a Second Language

Michael Leddy links to a William Zinsser article on effective writing. Good stuff.

It has to look right

In high school I took an art class. We had to draw stuff and paint stuff, you know. (I'm such an aficionado!) There was an odd-looking tree outside our house, and I painted that. The teacher didn't like it.

I wish I could remember her name.

It was a big old tree, with a tiny little branch sticking out the side of it a foot or two above the ground. Weird: trees don't look like that. That was why I wanted to paint it.

Well, that was also why the teacher didn't like it. It didn't look right.

I didn't understand her complaint at the time. That was what the tree looked like. But that wasn't good enough for my art teacher.

I understand now. If you were looking at the tree, you could see what it looked like. You could see it was an odd-looking tree. But if you were looking at my painting of the tree, you could only see that it was an odd-looking painting.

//

I was awakened by the phrase as rich as Croesus in my head this morning -- left-over from a recent post on my econ blog. So I started looking for stuff on Croesus on the internet. Found something that made me want to write this post.

From Sardis (the capital of Lydia in the time of King Croesus) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

In 133 B.C., Sardis came under Roman rule ... By the end of the first century B.C., it had become an important center of Christianity...

C'mon. There still wasn't Christianity yet, by the end of the first century B.C.

Or hey, maybe there was. But it sure doesn't look right.

If the Sardis article has its facts right, the wording should have been tweaked so that the odd little branch on their tree doesn't stick out like that.

FRED Adds 5,466 Series of Earnings Data

FRED:

FRED has added 5,466 series of earnings data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey. Categories include (among others) age, race, sex, occupation, full- or part-time status, and educational attainment.
Posted in FRED Announcements...

Depending on the meaning of the word include, the sequence "(among others)" is either important, or unnecessary.

Based on the meaning of the word include, then, the sequence "(among others)" is unnecessary.

Anyway, you always want to favor fewer words.

Commas are simpler

I use commas to set off phrases, like this one, that add a little something to a sentence. But then (sometimes) I'll use parentheses instead, to place less emphasis on the interrupting phrase. And sometimes -- more noticeably -- I'll set a phrase off with dashes because I want more emphasis on it.

But if I have a sentence that I want to be very, very clear, I only use the commas. The other forms add or subtract emphasis, and the change in emphasis gives the reader something else to think about. I don't want that. Even though the phrase in parentheses is least emphatic, it is the comma that is least noticeable and least distracting.

Sometimes you need them; sometimes you don't.

Oddly, I try to avoid colons and semicolons. They make sentences depend on other sentences in a burdensome way. I think they create difficulty for the reader. They create difficulty for me when I proofread: What is the mysterious connection between these sentences, that the author is trying to convey? And why doesn't he just say it outright?

Oddly, I try to avoid colons and semicolons; they make sentences depend on other sentences in a burdensome way. I think they create difficulty for the reader: They create difficulty for me when I proofread.

Respectively???

Rochon and Rossi: Endogenous money: the evolutionary versus revolutionary views (PDF, 20 pages), page 3:

For this reason, within post-Keynesian literature we can identify two overall approaches to this question, which we label here the ‘evolutionary’ and ‘revolutionary’ views respectively.

Maybe I have this wrong, but my impression is that "respectively" is used to match up the elements of one set to the elements of a second set. Specifically, the word implies that the two sets are ordered in such a way that the i^th element of the first set corresponds to the i^th element of the second set, for all the elements in the first set.

Rochon and Rossi provide only one set:

{‘evolutionary’, ‘revolutionary’}

Therefore, the word "respectively" in their sentence is superfluous, incorrect, and frankly quite funny.

Way funnier than this post.