The Elements of Legal Style

The Elements of Legal Style
by Bryan A. Garner

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Book Summary Information

Author: Bryan A. Garner
Edition: Hardcover
Published: 2002-03-21
ISBN: 0195141628
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Book Reviews of The Elements of Legal Style

Book Review: Like HAL 9000 addressing the Harvard Club
Summary: 4 Stars

This book gets a 5/5 for substance but a 1/5 for style.

To be fair, the writer of any book about writing has the heightened duties of the bomb-disposal technician or the internal affairs detective. Garner is fastidious to a fault and, given his audience, this is understandable. But the final product sounds like William F. Buckley, Jr. reading the phone book through Stephen Hawking's voice synthesizer. This is not boring, but distractingly awkward. I found myself paying more attention to the author's ecclectic phrase choices and mincing composition than his message. Garner weighs the advantanges of the spare "Attic" style of writing (Holmes) against the florid "asiatic" style (Cardozo), then somehow manages to adopt the worst of both of them.

(And did he really just say "asiatic?")

As a member and fan of the "California" school of legal writing (Kozinski) and rhetoric (Nancy Grace), I admit my distaste for this book is personal. The information itself is valuable. However, the content here overlaps substantially with "The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style (2d Ed.)." As a day-to-day reference work, that book is a much better bang for your buck.

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Summary of The Elements of Legal Style

With expanded coverage in this new edition, The Elements of Legal Style features additional sections, many more examples, and a thoroughly researched appendix that contains 80 major statements on prose style--what it is and how to attain it. Inspired by Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, this book clearly (often wittily) explains the full range of what legal writers need to know: mechanics, word choice, structure, and rhetoric, as well as all the special conventions that legal writers should follow in using headings, defined terms, quotations, and many other devices. Garner also provides abundant examples from the best legal writers of yesterday and today, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Clarence Darrow, Frank Easterbrook, and Antonin Scalia.
If you want to make your writing clearer, more precise, more persuasive, and above all more stylish, The Elements of Legal Style offers the surest--and the most enjoyable--means to that end.

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