The polar forms of writing—formal and informal—and the poor prospects for intermediates

Formal prose, I’ve emphasized, is a writing style, a distinct type of writing, differing from the informal in its ideals and aspirations: precise argument or spontaneous conversation. Is compromise possible between these writing types? There are exceptions, but mostly, the answer is no.

I’ve previously approached this stylistic distinction through a construal-level-theory analysis; linguist John McWhorter implies similar conclusions by his insights into the most informal written forms, such as text messaging, through which he highlights the distinctive character of conversation and from which derive many of the customs of social media. With educated talkers using sentences of only 7 to 10 words, the “grand old defining properties” of spoken language (due to talking being “largely subconscious and rapid,” writing and reading “deliberate and slow”) are “brevity, improvisation, and in-the-moment quality.” As McWhorter (“Talking with Your Fingers,” (April 2012)) assesses the state of contemporary language, “Two forms of language coexist in societies: choppy speech and crafted prose.”

Some combinations of the two forms succeed. McWhorter mentions one example: the anthropological novelists combined formal prose with dialog imitating speech. Another intermediate form is of key interest to legal-brief writers: the practical style adapts the formal-prose style to expressing belief rather than opinion. These are careful exceptions to the general rule that combining informal and formal styles is just bad writing. (The “formal-prose” style shouldn’t be confused with the “writing formalities,” which should be compromised.)

But the “plain-writing” trend advises writers to craft choppy prose! Trying to satisfy simultaneously the formal ideal of far-mode clarity and the informal ideal of near-mode immediacy and spontaneity is usually misguided, and perhaps it is also misguided to combine them successively—in different pieces. Can you be a master of both styles, while using them at different times for different purposes? Maybe, but probably not. Each style has its own habits, and writers who practice a great deal of conversation (whether by talking or texting) often seem to do so to their writing detriment; and the reverse, formal writers may deteriorate as conversationalists.

Improving at one task (such as conversation) conflicts with improving at another (such as formal writing) when they call for similar but different responses to the same or similar situations. An example of tasks calling for different responses to the same situation is typing using Dvorak and QWERTY layouts: if the task is typing a comma, you must type what would be a ‘w’ on a QWERTY keyboard, and you will lose proficiency in making one  response by learning the other. An example calling for different responses to similar situations is executing a forehand drive in tennis and table tennis: practicing one harms the other. Learning a task negatively transfers to the other when the latter requires inhibiting the response first learned; the extra effort to inhibit the behavior previously practiced makes it harder. If you practice Dvorak, you’ll have to inhibit the habit of typing ‘w’ when you type a comma; if you practice tennis, you'll have to inhibit your tendency to minimize wrist action when playing table tennis.

McWhorter explains, “Spoken language is fundamental, while written language is an artifice.” The habits, even instincts, ingrained in talk are the primary targets of inhibition in crafting formal prose; practicing talk, whether by actually talking, texting, or writing in the plain-talk style, harms your formal writing. But, just as some few may productively use different typing layouts, individuals probably vary in the harm to their formal writing due to negative transfer from conversation or informal writing.

The new topic/stress principle: Topic is concrete, stress abstract

Recall the sequence (concrete to abstract, near to far):

conversation – informal prose – formal prose – poetry

Formal prose is a style of writing that evolved—primarily to serve abstract matters, where clarity is the central virtue—to exploit the specific virtues of written discourse. It is far-mode clarity that is most prized in this style; near-mode is essential but subordinate. To subordinate near to far, formal prose uses a characteristic device at various structural levels: new matter is introduced in far mode and developed in near mode.

At the sentence level, this is accomplished by an application of topic/stress segmentation: the stress—which introduces important new information—is abstract; the topic—which recapitulates old information—is concrete.

Definitions and principles

In formal prose (which includes the most effective legal-brief writing), the topic (usually the sentence subject) announces what the sentence is about, often through association with previous information. The stress position (I’ll continue using the term despite the technical misnomer) refers to the last word or words before a period, colon, semicolon, and sometimes a dash; it contains important new information. (We know this about topic and stress mainly due to the work of Joseph Williams and George Gopen.)

Construal-level theory links concreteness to psychological proximity and abstractness to psychological distance. In sentence processing, the topic’s position is near and the stress’s position is far, and formal prose not only honors the topic and stress positions, their contents are typically concrete and abstract respectively, to correspond with their near and far locations in the sentence. New information is first presented abstractly in the stress position and then developed concretely by being recapitulated in a more specific form in the topics of subsequent sentences.

A counter-example?

The reader expects the topic to be concrete and the stress abstract, and each receives greatest emphasis when they satisfy the expectation. This observation answers a counterexample offered by Wayne Schiess, purporting to show that the topic is more important than the stress:

To me, number one emphasizes President Bush more. 

(1) President Bush made mistakes.

(2) Mistakes were made by President Bush.

Addressing Wayne’s argument fills a lacuna in topic/stress theory: what determines the stress-position’s size? Although “President Bush” constitutes a terminal phrase in number two, that phrase—referencing a near-mode concrete particular rather than a far-mode disposition—isn’t well suited to receive stress. The reader expands the stress position to encompass a suitable abstraction, which it finds in the sentence’s predicate, “were made,” which the sentence emphasizes.

(Generalizations like this new topic/stress principle are often best used to sharpen intuition rather than to replace it. I don’t think it would have occurred to me that number two emphasizes the predicate without its aid, but once I’ve applied the principle, the intuition perseveres.)

Rewriting the “writing rules”

The new topic/stress principle grounds, consolidates, and corrects several established “writing rules.”

Avoid nominalization is one-sided over-reaction; nominalization creates far-mode abstractions, commonly suitable in the stress but not, such as to supplement an excessively abstract verb, in the topic’s vicinity.

Favor agents as subjects is a simplistic rendition of formal-prose’s preference for concrete topics.

Concrete examples should precede new abstractions describes a practice in the (informal, near-mode) plain style, unsuited for formal prose.

“Formal” and “informal” writing differ in word order

Not incessantly but at least occasionally, unobtrusively yet obviously—formal writing hovers on the edge of awkwardness. This is unremarked by the authorities, as is the explanation: formal writing’s proclivity to violate standard word order.

Standard word order in English

Contemporary English language is intermediate among languages in the rigidity of its word order, neither strictly obligatory like Latin nor absent like Chinese. (Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (1984).) Perhaps this averageness conceals the pragmatic importance of word order in English, but a hallmark of formal writing (“classic prose”) is that it sacrifices “Naturalness” for “Succinctness,” which is to say, cognitive fluency for cohesiveness and proportioned emphasis.

The standard English word order is:

Subject – Verb – Object – Adverbial modifiers

This standard word order is obeyed more consistently in informal writing because writing that takes conversation as its model is inspired by the ideal of spontaneity, an impression contrived word order subverts.

Here’s an example of a sentence written for proportioned emphasis and rewritten for conversationality.

California may be unique in unconstitutionally allowing its attorney guild to enforce its self-adjudicated costs as a judgment, but the universal state-bar practice of charging costs to respondents (regardless of how the state bars can collect them) derives from changes in the criminal law that, despite their legality, damage the system’s integrity: policies of victim restitution and social restitution.

California may be unique in unconstitutionally allowing its attorney guild to enforce its self-adjudicated costs as a judgment, but the universal state-bar practice of charging costs to respondents (regardless of how the state bars can collect them) derives from changes in the criminal law that damage the system’s integrity despite their legality: policies of victim restitution and social restitution.

In the formal or “classic prose” version, the adverbial modifier “despite their legality” is placed after the subject and before the verb of the subordinate that clause. In the conversational rendition, the modifier occurs in the stress position preceding the colon, the standard English word order. The classic-prose version is clearer because “damage the system’s integrity,” which occupies the stress position, adds the most important new information. But because breaching standard English word order is disfluent, the classic-prose version is slightly awkward.  

Recouping fluency with the comma

Formal writing is awkward in the manner of poetry. One reason (not the only reason) poetry is harder to read than prose is that it takes liberties with the standard English word order. In its sacrifice of fluency for emphasis, formal writing is intermediate between oral conversation and poetry:

Oral conversation – Informal writing – Formal writing – Poetry

Offsetting its often novel word order, poetry has means of recouping some measure of cognitive fluency: verse and rhyme. Classic prose’s palliative is the lowly comma. In the classic-prose version, the displaced modifying phrase is set off by commas despite its restrictive character. Glimpses of this important use of the comma can be seen in rules concerning “interruptive phrases,” but in the conversational example, the despite phrase isn’t interruptive. It’s just out of order. Another partial application of the principle that violations of standard word order call for commas is the rule to set off a periodic sentence’s introductory modifiers.

Remaining issues

Allowing the nature of contemporary English, occupying a middle ground between structured and unstructured language, it remains odd that the standard authorities have failed to notice this distinguishing difference between formal and informal writing, but some responsibility may fall to certain gaps in Joseph M. Williams and George D. Gapon’s topic/stress theory of sentence organization:  1) the stress position is said to be unique to English; and 2) it originated in conversation.

These two facts raise theoretical problems. If stress position is critically important for emphasis in English, do other languages each have their own idiosyncratic means of emphasis? This seems dubious: if language were inherently inclined to developing syntactic cues to emphasis, it’s unlikely that only English would have seized on stress position and topic/stress structure, whose congruence with general primacy/recency effects is unlikely to be coincidental. The other fact, the origin of stress position in oral communication, is in tension with the observation that formal writing accentuates use of the stress position: why was the limited usefulness of stress position in oral communication, which is aided immeasurably by nonverbal communication, sufficient to secure that position’s role?

I leave these issues for future treatment.

Writers should exploit all punctuation marks: Reflections on misguided campaigns to reduce punctuation types

Omissive punctuation practices on Twitter convince some observers the apostrophe is superfluous, but a recent essay in New Republic news magazine dismissed the rumors of imminent apostrophe extinction. The author, however, wasn’t exactly happy about the apostrophe’s endurance, cautioning only that leaving it out will continue to “look funny” in formal writing. 

Considering the absence of consensus about which to exterminate, the impulse to kill some disliked punctuation is surprisingly strong. George Orwell thought the semicolon unnecessary and resolved to avoid it; some writers demand abolition of the dash; competent legal writers have opposed hyphenation of many compound adjectives, claiming they’re unsightly and often unnecessary; it’s been claimed that the comma was invented or perpetuated because publishers benefit from their supposedly unnecessary consumption of space; and I’ve condemned the virgule.

This false economy of punctuation types isn’t rational, since an abundance of types for marking syntactic distinctions means greater ease for readers. We have few punctuation types not because of the uselessness of marking additional syntactic distinctions but because of the difficulties of socially coordinating on a new punctuation type, which must be commonly understood and highly practiced. Contrived punctuation doesn’t stick: it requires too great an adoption rate before it gathers momentum. Emoticons (like the smiley) may seem an exception, but they prove the rule: they augment lexicon rather than representing syntax. Lexicon accrues more rapidly than punctuation types not only because we need many more semantic distinctions but also because we more readily learn the meaning of new semantic than syntactic signs. (Acquiring words is in the genes, but writing and its punctuation are parts of culture.)

Why do some writers wish for fewer types of punctuation? One reason is that overuse and misuse often turn them against the whole type. I formed a prejudice against the virgule (/) when enduring an employer who expressed any conjoined or disjoined legal claims with a weaseling and/or. Exposure to some bad freestyle blogging incites people against the dash, and the irritating misuse of the apostrophe to create plurals of names could be enough to alienate some writers.

Another source of animus against punctuation variety is that writers often don’t understand how punctuation helps readers. On discovering that they can understand text without a certain punctuation type, they conclude that it’s unnecessary (the main argument against the apostrophe in the New Republic piece), but punctuation serves primarily to enhance cognitive fluency, not to render text intelligible or disambiguate expressions.

Finally, pedagogy’s emphasis on signaling literacy and competence through correct grammar and mechanics leads some writers to view punctuation marks as occasions for error rather than as promoters of cognitive ease. Fewer distinctions mean less embarrassment.

Using all the available punctuation marks is part of exploiting the full expressive power of written language. But keep in mind what does not follow: if variety (in punctuation types) is a spice of life, heaviness (of punctuation tokens) is a drag.

Three senses of "conversational" writing

[Builds on What is classic prose?: "Clear and Simple as the Truth” reinterpreted through construal-level theory]

Writing advice confuses when it extols ambiguous virtues such as being “conversational,” a term that might identify a manner of writing by any of three characteristics: stylistic similarity to conversation, stylistic suitability for conversation, and conversational aim. Whether a writer ought to strive for conversationality depends on the term’s intended sense and the writer’s purpose.

1. Similarity to ideal conversation: Ideal conversation is not ideal writing.

Conversation fundamentally differs from writing in its reliance on nonverbal cues. Ideal conversation is more fluent than ideal writing because of conversation’s reliance on the nonverbal: where less needs be explicit, its cognitive load should be smaller. Ideal classic or practical writing will lack the fluency of ideal conversation.

2. Suitability as conversation: Ideal written sentences might be ideal conversation.

Sentences utterly unsuitable for conversation because they can’t be parsed in one hearing do not conform to any established contemporary style. Although most writers should avoid sentences that require rereading due to their structural and semantic complexity, even this advice is conditional. Past styles have been influential where the sentences demand rereading, for example, Samuel Johnson’s (Preface to Shakespeare):

That praises are without reason lavished on the dead, and that the honors due only to excellence are paid to antiquity, is a complaint likely to be always continued by those, who, being able to add nothing to truth, hope for eminence from the heresies of paradox: or those, who, being forced by disappointment upon consolatory expedients, are willing to hope from posterity what the present age refuses, and flatter themselves that the regard which is yet denied by envy, will be at last bestowed by time. (From Thomas and Turner, "Clear and Simple as the Truth" at p. 15.)

3. Conversational aim: Only some writings should have conversational aims.

Writing styles taking a far-mode stance—styles which are “deeply” formal—can nonetheless seem conversational if they deal with opinion rather than belief by working through the intellectual issues and then presenting the results from a detached perspective. This form of conversationality is correctly prized, but it isn’t universally applicable. The practical style, ideal for a brief’s argument section, generally won’t sound conversational, even in this sense, because the legal-practical style typically requires describing the main results found in judicial opinions, not working through intellectual issues.

Emphasis by typography

Attorneys often use boldface (and italics) to emphasize arguments, an overdone practice if it should be done at all. Yet typographical emphasis seems effective in blog writing. Exploring the reason for the difference might help refine the usage of typographical emphasis in briefs—or preclude it.

Bloggers use typographical emphasis effectively to highlight key claims, but claims are rarely key in a legal brief. Blog writing is an exercise in originality of conception, so it’s incumbent on the blogger to draw attention to those original conclusions, whereas legal briefing should seek to minimize the appearance of being original. What warrants emphasis in briefs is argument, not conclusion. Succinct conclusions are easily emphasized. But every part of an argument is equally important objectively, and which part is most important subjectively depends on the reader, so emphasizing part of an argument typographically creates a sense of non sequitur, since the bolded argument doesn't pull its weight. Various parts of the argument are more important for different readers, the emphasized passage or words miscuing them. Typography is too crude a technique for emphasizing parts of an argument, which must display the precise relationships among its parts in nuanced fashion.

Legal writers usefully emphasize headings typographically, but bolded headings must function as headings if they are to avoid the heavy-handedness of bolding parts of arguments. Rather than state part of the following argument, they should summarize or describe the section of text they govern.

There’s also a more speculative reason why bolding body text might always be a bad idea for legal briefs: it may subtly offend the judge by violating a status formality, an informal rule designed to protect the judge’s status. One of the common demands of rules of status formality in courtrooms is that lawyers must always avoid making their own work easier at the expense of making the judge’s work harder. Since it is actually a bit harder to read boldface than roman text, this status formality might apply, the author having other means of emphasis that don’t burden the judge. 

You, too, have an optimal sentence length

Plain-writing proponents advise you to check your documents’ average sentence lengths to guarantee against excess: Bryan Garner recommends an average of 20 words per sentence, and some plain writers recommend 15. Since every writer has an optimal average sentence length, the better advice is to use your own optimum rather than an arbitrary standard. I find, in fact, that when the average sentence length departs from my average, the document needs more work. Nobody has previously explained why writers consistently prefer a certain average sentence length, but inasmuch as “writer’s voice” is mostly sentence length, an explanation could help writers find their “true voice.”

I assume excellent writers prefer their strengths to their weaknesses, and I hypothesize that optimal sentence length is a trade-off between two abilities integral to writing: abstraction and sequencing. Typically, we construct sentences by abstraction and paragraphs by sequencing. Constructing a coherent sentence requires abstracting a suitably deep idea, but linking sentences to form cohesive paragraphs requires attending to their sequential relations. Long sentences capitalize on the writer’s ability to entertain a complex abstraction to be stated in words. Short sentences capitalize on the writer’s ability to link ideas in successive sentences. To make the most of their ability to entertain complex abstractions, writers strong on abstraction compared to sequencing will write long sentences, and to make the most of their ability to sequence thought, writers strong on sequencing compared to abstraction will write short sentences.

The distinction between abstraction and sequencing sounds somewhat like right and left hemisphere, but it isn’t. Here, we’re not talking about whether the internal processing is simultaneous or serial but whether the output is a unified abstraction or a sequence. The dimension of relative strength in abstraction compared to sequencing most resembles construal level: abstraction being far (resulting from abstract construal) and sequencing near (resulting from concrete construal). Personal consistencies in tendency to think far or near are shown, as in the finding that people who wake up late and prefer to work at night (“night owls”) tend to think far.

One educator’s questionnaire estimates your position on what amounts to far versus near thinking, conceived as Global-versus-Sequential learning style. (Hat tip: Words, Ideas, and Things.) I’d be interested in anyone’s results measuring their sentence lengths and testing their Global-Sequential position. My average sentence length is 25 and Global-Sequential learning-style score is 7 (moderately high Global). 

If you apply this test, bear in mind these caveats: 

1. Short documents will diverge from your average due to random statistical fluctuation.

2. Some documents should diverge from your optimum when the need to write in a particular voice outweighs achieving your highest literary quality.

3. Any document will not only be more interesting but also clearer if you vary the sentences' length. 

Enjoyability

Explaining a contest award for “Best Writing,” law-technology blogger Dennis Kennedy performed an “actually pompous” speech act: “I like what I like”—the arrogance involved, labeling his personal tastes as “best,” whereas “Best-liked Writing” would be unexceptionable. But “pompous” might be too mild a description if Kennedy thinks that assessing writing style is expressing one’s tastes, which vary less for style than for content.

Liking a writing style usually means enjoying it, and even for legal writing, enjoyability rather accurately measures effectiveness. The measure isn’t perfect. The Writing Virtues, truly criterial, may not line up perfectly with enjoyability; in legal writing, you shouldn’t sacrifice too much Concision for enjoyability’s sake. Although imperfect, the equation between enjoyability and effectiveness is strong to where—if the briefs convey the same information—the better-written brief is usually more enjoyable to read. Comprehension is a motivated activity, and enjoyment is the only incentive a writer can reliably offer.

Dennis Kennedy, then, is correct that his degree of enjoyment measures the writer’s skill. His failing is the common one that’s responsible for why writers are rarely paid what they’re worth: he can’t distinguish his enjoyment of the writing itself from his enjoyment of its content. Readers know when they enjoy, but they usually don’t know what they enjoy. They know they liked an article, but their self-rated enjoyment of the writing is overshadowingly biased by how much they enjoy the content, so that many readers can tell which article is written better only when equally enthused about the contents of each: in persuasion, agreeing with the message; in exposition, finding interest in the information.

Content can be so distracting that reading authors whose substance doesn’t much interest you is a useful exercise, for it lets you focus on the writing style. I read Thomas Hardy for style, although I don’t care much for his romantic tragedies. Good writing, taken pure, is a tonic.

You might think legal writers supplying their work to attorneys have an easy sell, since the attorney readers are interested in their cases and the writers are persuading favorably. Unfortunately for legal writers who are employees or contractors, a trial attorney often most enjoys what’s most strongly favorable to his case. The result is a bias toward shallow analysis and overstatement. Attorneys should have a better opportunity to discern able writers than many other employers of writers have, since attorney interest in the subject matter is a given, but a trial attorney’s sense of enjoyability is often yoked to an exaggerated confidence in the case’s strength.

The writer's ineffable "voice": The immutability of optimal sentence length

When a friend phones, you know her identity by the sound of her voice. This is the basis for the writer's-voice metaphor, but it’s only a metaphor. The features distinguishing spoken voices refer to the physical dimensions of the sound waves the vocal chords produce, and a pen’s scratch or a keyboard’s click are failed candidates for the voice that’s purported to infuse the scratcher or clicker’s document.

If the spoken voice is the usual metaphor, expression of the writer’s personality is the standard explanation, although it retreats to a murkier metaphor. A real explanation would link the specific characteristics of writing said to constitute voice to specific personality traits. Perhaps someone will someday link writers’ personality traits to expressive style, but before theorists can even speak of a linkage between personality and manner of written expression, they have to know the expressive traits voice comprises. When graphologists, for example, claim styles of handwriting are linked to the writers’ personalities, they have in mind connections like, “If the writer makes her dots above her letter ‘i’ like little circles, she will have histrionic tendencies"; or, “A rising baseline expresses an optimistic outlook.” Writing-voice exponents don’t specify any candidates for the expressive equivalents of circular dots or upward slope, never mind whether they correlate with personality.

Nobody knows how to talk about writers’ voice; yet, some writers manifest a distinct “voice.” Why should being specific about what they manifest be so difficult? My answer is that there’s an obvious solution, but it is, on second thought, obviously wrong—so obviously, that we don’t even consider it; but no other solutions are forthcoming. The obvious solution is that expert writers whose voices are said to differ write sentences distinctive in their length. The rebuttal is that, if voice is worth discussing—if writers can find their authentic voices—then voice can’t be a trait writers adopt as casually as making their sentences longer or shorter. Finally, the mistake the rebuttal commits is ignoring that an expert writer lacks the capacity to change his average sentence length without damaging his expressive capability: optimal average sentence length is immutable.

If you’re like me, when pressed for examples of distinctive voice you think of Hemingway and Faulkner, who are so unlike in the length of their sentences that it overshadows other differences. A second formal difference between them, preference for common versus esoteric words, accommodates different typical sentence lengths: to cohere, long sentences require abstraction. But problematically, average sentence length seems a matter of choice or preference, rather than an inherent personal quality. The idea that finding your voice means achieving stability at your optimal sentence length strikes, at first, as crudely reductionist. Writing teachers often advise students to shorten their sentences, and to the extent this advice helps, it would not seem tantamount to directing students to write in an inauthentic voice. Misleading in this scenario is that we’re talking about students who haven’t "found" their voices—and probably never will. Imagine telling Faulkner to shorten his sentences.

An element of commercial branding probably contributed to polarizing the Hemingway-Faulkner contrast, but I have an example of a professional writer being “told” to shorten his sentences. Science writer Steven Berlin Johnson—on whose casual research the present sentence-length theory of voice is based—found that Malcolm Gladwell’s average sentences were 6.5 words shorter than Johnson’s. His reaction is telling, Johnson declaring, “A 25% drop in sentence length has to alter the reading experience dramatically"; and he joked, “Clearly, the only things separating me from selling ten million copies of my books are those extra 6.5 words per sentence.” While this was overstatement—the writers’ topics no doubt affect their popularity—it probably isn’t entirely false, since a greater number of readers can understand short sentences than can understand long ones. This is why primary-school texts contain very short sentences! Yet, there’s no sign that Johnson—already an accessible writer—tried to make his writing still more accessible by using shorter sentences. Instead, Johnson’s posting focused on each writer's invariant sentence length—evidence that, for the expert writer, optimal sentence length is an immutable trait. For immature writers, the advice to shorten sentences nudges them toward their “authentic voice” or, at least, toward a degree of syntactic complexity they can manage, but it can be taken too far—and often is.

Expert-writers' consistency in their works' syntactic complexity is evidence that mature voice is optimal average sentence length; evidence against this hypothesis is that average sentence length has declined over the years, from 50 words in pre-Elizabethan times, to 29 in Victorian times, to 20 words per sentence, today. (William H. DuBay. (2006) Unlocking Language: The Classic Readability Studies.) If optimal average sentence length is voice, it shouldn't change over generations: if environments change it, then why not training regimens, so that Steven Berlin Johnson could train himself to write shorter sentences—to write more like Malcolm Gladwell?

The objection seems surmountable. In an era when a “good writer” was expected to average more than 30 words per sentence, one who could sustain only 20 would choose a different occupation; today, it can seem the reverse is true. With popular writing style ever increasingly that of marketers, it may seem that those whose genes cause them to write their best using complex syntax will be declared incompetent. But this is unlikely: the unity of language and thought suggests that well-managed syntactic complexity accompanies competent ideational complexity. Before mass advertising arose, the world might have found little use for the master of the simple sentence, but today's complex world still needs complex thinkers.

Formality. Part 4. The celebration of informality and the unsettled status of contractions

[Expand in separate window]

“Plain writing” means Informal register. As the Chart depicts, Informal is the better register insofar as Personal address (yellow) is direct and Hyper-grammatical rules (green) are disregarded; but Formal is better insofar as Succinctness (blue) is uncompromised and Universality (gray) is preferred. This assessment, it’s crucial to understand, brackets off register’s norms (Column 6): reducing or widening the gap between the (otherwise) effective and the normative is the measure of a trend’s help or harm.

Twice, the plain-writing trend beneficially shifted the prevailing legal register. First, it persuaded practically everyone that the Ceremonial register is ineffective. Second—its greatest triumph—it dethroned the Formal register’s Hyper-grammatical rules, and allied with the descriptive linguists, made laughing stock of pseudo-grammatical Formalities, such as avoiding conjunctions at the beginning of sentences or prepositions at their end.

But also, plain writing detrimentally shifted the prevailing register, favoring Naturalness over Succinctness to diminish written language’s unique expressive power. Some examples. Bryan Garner advises legal writers to average no more than 20 words per sentence; Wayne Schiess advocates (and writes) very short paragraphs; and plain-language exponents in general write loosely, with abundant phrasal verbs.

A collateral detriment comprises the insouciant breaches encouraged by plain-writing exponents, who tend to view brief writing from a writer’s standpoint more than a lawyer’s and fail to curb a writer’s natural resentment of stymying conventions. The best example is Bryan Garner’s suggestion to replace inline citation with footnotes, breaching the powerful status Formality by compelling the judge to change his work habits, an innovation worse than a distance-Formality breach of register. The suggested practice is distracting and inefficient, and it affronts the judge to steal expressive ease by imposing on him. Using an unorthodox citation convention assumes a risk whose harmfulness writers— convinced they’re improving their briefs’ persuasiveness, while really sabotaging it by angering the judge—might never discover.

Breaching mere distance Formalities by using the wrong register isn’t innocuous, and the contraction is the worst distance-Formality breach plain writers urge on us. (I was guilty of dispensing that bad advice when I analyzed the status Formality and excluded the distance Formalities.) Notice in the Chart that contraction avoidance is a Hyper-grammatical rule (green), but anomalously, its dominant register (column 6) is Formal. Avoiding contractions is the very strongest Hyper-grammatical rule: more than any other Informality, contractions smack of conversationality, and introducing them is alienating. The judge won’t think you’re uppity, as when you force him to adjust to different formats, but as Justice Scalia once remarked, he’ll infer you’re trying to be chummy.

A natural question is why the plain-writing trend not only challenges inappropriate Formalities but also repudiates the appropriate, especially by de-emphasizing Succinctness. After law departments commodified legal-writing instruction, plain writing’s teachability fortified it as the main reformist approach to brief writing. Meanwhile, commodification devalues writing teachers, isolating them and interesting them in reducing social distance. Writing teachers are an out-group in law, and the plain-writing trend, for good and ill, expresses their interest in abolishing the markers of social distance.

Linguistic "register" or What is formality in writing, and why do readers demand compliance with formality rules? Part 3. Choice of register

Click image to expand, preferably in separate window

The chart's new sixth column tells what's good and what's bad, what's in and what's out. Formal is the traditional register for law: what should be more formal than the relationship between judge and attorney? Informal register now vies for dominance, its jurisdiction extended by expelling (most of) the hyper-grammatical rules. Everyone agrees it's good you can now start sentences with and. The restriction was arbitrary, its grammatical pretensions dishonest. The false impression that the Informal register is better than the Formal is hard to resist.

Formal register shows its good side when the feature it enlarges improves a writing Virtue, like succinctness (for Concision) and universality (for Clarity). Legal writers should observe the hyper-grammatical and personal-reference Formalities the least that evades violating one, but they should retain (or acquire) the Formal features of succinctness and universality the most their skills allow.

Next part: The celebration of informality and the unsettled status of contractions