A successful letter of recommendation can open doors and make a lasting impression. A quick Internet search will tell you what to put in a letter of recommendation; but it is just as important to know what to leave out.

Prepositions can add valuable detail and complexity to sentences, but they also invite nominalizations, passive constructions, and bloat. When these single-word connectors pile up in writing, you can kill the flow of your sentence and confuse your reader. What could make this worse? Multi-word prepositions.

The issue statement is the first substantive content in a legal brief.^[1] It’s also the first opportunity to shape how the court and its staff view our case. So the last thing we want is for readers to struggle or lose sight of our message.

Before the first day of your 1L year, you probably spent 30 minutes reading one page of a 17th century case (and dreaded having to read nine more before class). If you were anything like me, you sighed and consulted Black’s Law Dictionary to decipher the terminology combined in doublets and triplets—and were often disappointed to find the words were near-synonyms or out of use. You rightly identified these terms as archaic and redundant. But by the end of your 3L year, you were unfazed by the English, French, and Latin terms mixed within dense blocks of text. You could even understand what you read and use it to argue for classroom clients! You were ready to enter the profession, thinking and writing like a lawyer.

“How hungry is my reader?” When we sit down to write a web page, report, proposal, or blog post, we’re often plagued by uncertainty about our readers’ appetite for our content. Am I writing for a headline-only grazer? An executive summary diner? A footnotes-and-all chowhound? One size cannot fit all because readers differ in their appetite for detail. What’s a writer to do?

One misconception about editing is that it’s simply a function of time—that if given the same document and the same block of time, everybody would spot the same edits. That’s not true. Effective editors train themselves to spot specific edits. That is, they go into every editorial session knowing how wordiness usually arises and how to fix it. With practice and experience, those fixes become editorial reflexes.

Business clichés range from annoying to nonsensical to downright offensive. We’ve discussed them several times in the past, but today we’re looking at the ones you submitted—things that drive you crazy that you wish you’d never hear again. After putting the call out to friends, colleagues, and loved ones, we’re breaking down (in three parts) 24 annoying business clichés to get rid of in 2024.

Legal dramas are full of hot-headed lawyers overflowing with righteous indignation, ready to steamroll injustice by the force of their convictions. The courtroom scenes play out with biting repartee and shouts of “objection!” until at last the verdict is revealed, and the “good guys” walk away with their hard-earned, well-deserved victory. Opposing counsel glares as our heroic lawyer marches triumphantly to a waiting crowd of excited reporters and shares the good news.

Maybe you’ve heard folks complaining about how young people tend to verb their nouns—adulting comes to mind. These new word constructions come from the need to make a static thing dynamic. In the case of adulting, the fact of living an adult life isn’t just a state of being, but takes constant and active maintenance. Verbing your nouns shows this constant state of motion.

If your job requires you to write regularly, consider your readers and today’s changing exposure to words when drafting your work. With every day’s onslaught of content from emails, text messages, social media, and meetings—both on and offline—modern office workers don’t have the time or patience to read unnecessary words to get to your point. Wordy writing is a great way to get someone to close an email or dump a proposal without finding out what it’s about.