A legal-writing
authority advises:
View your reader as a companionable friend—someone with a warm sense of humor and a love of simple directness. Write like you're actually talking to that friend, but talking with enough leisure to frame your thoughts concisely and interestingly. John R. Trimble, Writing with Style 73 (2d ed. 2000). (HT: Bryan Garner, Usage Tip of the Day, November 12, 2013.)
Some writers
hail Trimble’s advice as profound, while others ignore it as meaningless, but I
hold it is quite wrong. Legal-brief writing (like other efforts at exerting intellectual
influence) differs from conversation not just in degree: influential
intellectual writing differs from conversation in its guiding formal virtue. Whereas
good conversation is (or seems)
spontaneous, good writing is clear.
One way the difference
manifests is that competent writers force important new ideas to the sentence’s
end. The last word or tight phrase preceding the point of syntactic closure
(period, semicolon, or colon) is termed by Joseph M. Williams (Style: Toward Clarity and Grace) the stress position; and according to another
student of sentence structure, George D. Gopen (A
new approach to legal writing), failure to exploit the stress position
is legal-writers’ single greatest formal weakness: out of hundreds of lawyers Gopen
has trained, the stress position was properly used by a handful. Proper use of
the stress position is at the threshold of competent writing, but misuse of the stress position doesn’t always sound
bad. Locating trivia in the stress position produces limp sentences, but often lawyers fill the stress position with misleading
substantive language. When a document contains sentences with misleading
emphases, readers—due to conflicting cues about what’s important—find the
document’s meaning hazy.
The stress
position isn’t unique to written
English; spoken English sentences end in higher pitch, but in spoken English,
stress position is subordinate to nonverbal cues. It is also subordinate to
standard word order, which conversation
usually follows because reorganized sentences sound contrived, violating the conversational
norm favoring spontaneity. Take as an example the previous paragraph’s final
sentence, which trades
moderate disfluency for high clarity:
When a document contains sentences with misleading emphases, readers—due to conflicting cues about what’s important—find its meaning hazy.
This is too
contrived for good conversation; without the engineered word order, we might
say:
Readers find a document’s meaning hazy, due to conflicting cues about what’s important, when it contains sentences with misleading emphases.
The talk version beats the clear version in cognitive fluency (and in apparent
spontaneity), but it loses in clarity (partly) because of its misuse of the stress
position. Hazy meaning is the
sentence’s key contribution, whereas the talk version stresses misleading
emphases, an idea previously introduced. Stress position isn’t the
only way reorganized sentence structure departs
from talk, but Gopen’s
experience indicates that, in legal writing, it’s the most ignored. Exploiting
the stress position requires sentences differing from talk.
Haziness takes a
toll on all argumentative writing; in abstract endeavors, it detracts from
thought itself. With clarity being much about emphasis, reorganizing sentence
structure is a medium through which clear
writing deepens thought. (“Plain-talk
writing” is inherently inimical to clear thought.)
In the next
entries, I’ll discuss how and why the importance of Williams and Gopen’s
discovery of the stress position is almost invariably missed by writing
authorities. Resistance to exploiting the stress position will be seen rooted in a misguided attachment to the pragmatics of talk. We will also see
that clear writing’s difference from talk has implications for … you guessed
it, the comma. It supplies the last big piece to the comma puzzle.
