Can I Quote You on That?

by Ken Bresler

A version of this article appeared in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, Sept. 4, 2017

Here are my favorite quotations about legal writing.

“There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content.”

– Fred Rodell, “Goodbye to Law Reviews,” 23 Virginia Law Review 38, 38 (1936)

“When I read most briefs, I want to scream. I want to throw the brief out the window and jump.”

– Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time (1995), p. 105

“The difficult task, after one learns how to think like a lawyer, is relearning how to write like a human being.”

– Floyd Abrams

“In the third year of law school, they ought to teach English as a Second Language.”

– Stephen Wermiel

“The language of law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.”

– Learned Hand, “Is There a Common Will,” 28 Michigan Law Review 46, 52 (1929) (The title has no question mark.)

“Lawyers should acknowledge a professional obligation to wage war against bad legal writing.”

– Irving Younger, Symptoms of Bad Writing, American Bar Association Journal, May 1986, at 113

I’ve confirmed the accuracy of these quotations. For example, I emailed both Floyd Abrams and Stephen Wermiel, and they emailed back.

Here’s my favorite quotation about writing in general:

“I write in order to understand as much as to be understood.”

– Elie Wiesel, One Generation After (2011 edition), p. 173

As for a quotation about editing, have you heard that no passion in the world is equal to the passion to edit someone else’s words? It’s attributed to H. G. Wells in varying forms, and to other writers, including William Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot. Both the varying forms and varying attributions are tipoffs that authorship is unknown. It’s a great sentiment, but it’s not an attributable quotation.  An H. G. Wells scholar, Professor Simon James at Durham University in the U.K., has researched the supposed quotation and its variations. His conclusion, in an email to me: “I’m afraid this one is unattributed.”

So here’s my favorite sentiment about editing. It’s in quotation marks, but it’s not a quotation of anyone known.

“No passion in the world, no love or hate, is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s words.”

– Unknown

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Addendum, Aug. 9, 2018: Then there’s this one…

“Every lesson that students of the English language and teachers of writing seek to instill and that the great writers exemplify is turned on its head in legal writing.”

– Richard Posner, “Goodbye to the Blue Book,” 53 University of Chicago Law Review 1343, 1349 (1986).