Product Description

Effective Writing offers specific advice on how to write effectively the many kinds of writing lawyers do in actual practice. It considers what makes writing effective in letters of various kinds, forms, bills, the many kinds of writing done through the trial, writing for an appeal, contracts, and writing for wills and trusts. The last chapter addresses how to rewrite to promote more effective thinking and how to rewrite for the reader, going beyond the usual considerations of correct or "plain" style to address what constitutes effective word choice, sentence structure, organization, citation and quotation in real contexts. The book is seasoned with "sidebars"—brief stories about legal writing from many judges, lawyers, and other writers-- that help to bring the world of legal writing alive. This book is the product of a collaboration between a distinguished lawyer and a professor of English (Rhetoric and Writing).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2279233 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 204 pages

About the Author
John Phelps Warnock has a J.D. (1968) from the New York University School of Law, where he was a Root-Tilden Scholar. Over the last twenty-five years, he has consulted on legal writing to law firms and judicial groups in the United States and Canada and was a long-time member of the faculty for the annual Judgment Writing Seminar offered by the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice. He is a graduate of Amherst College, where he was a Sloan scholar, and Oxford University, where he was a Keasbey scholar. He now teaches rhetoric and writing in the English Department at the University of Arizona. He is a member of the Arizona Bar on inactive status.

Harold C. "Hal" Warnock (1912-1997) was a member of the Arizona Bar for over sixty years. He was a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and a Fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel. He was a founding member of the Arizona Chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates and served as President of the National Association of Railroad Trial Counsel. He was twice appointed by the Governor of the state as Co-Chair of the Arizona Commission on Uniform Laws, and was appointed in 1991 as Arizona contact person for the Joint Editorial Board of the Uniform Probate Code Commission. Besides writing as a practicing lawyer, he published articles about the law and nonfiction about his experiences playing baseball for the St. Louis Browns in the 1930s.

Customer Reviews

Notes on "Effective Writing: A Handbook..."
This little book offers sound advice. Occasionally clever, "Effective Writing" outlines a basic writing guide to the journeyman lawyer with intelligence and wit.(That that alone makes this text worth more than you pay for it.) The authors' emphasis on "effective" writing rather than merely efficient prose offers an angle to many seasoned readers. If more lawyers followed the practical rules in the book, our profession would make a lot of judges and clients happier.
BDJ