In each question that follows, one choice is a misusage that wouldn’t pass muster with a good copy editor. See whether you can recognize the traditionally correct forms.
Nov 1, 2018 1:30 AM CDT
Bryan Garner: As a matter of linguistic epidemiology, if a malapropism becomes common enough, it becomes a nonstandard usage.” Photo by Winn Fuqua Photography
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Over time, words can change in spelling, meaning and pronunciation. In this quiz, choose the pronunciation favored in the late 19th century through the 20th.
A web platform that provides law-related historic linguistics information was announced Monday by Brigham Young University’s J. Reuben Clark Law School.
The U.S. Supreme Court has corrected misspellings, wrong word choices, missing words and grammatical missteps in several Supreme Court opinions this term, according to a website that reveals the corrections.
There’s a widespread problem in the way junior lawyers answer questions by email. They tend to respond to moderately complex legal questions merely with answers—without explicitly repeating the question.
Aug 1, 2018 2:20 AM CDT
Bryan Garner: “A question that every legal writer should ask is: ‘When will clarity come?’” Photograph by Winn Fuqua Photography.
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Does the usual meaning of a word carry over to a legal definition? The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on this question in a case involving sports hero Jim Thorpe.
When I started my law blog in June 2016, I did so without too much trepidation. I was essentially briefing cases and writing about my practice in ways I was…
To effect change, we can set an example through precision in our own word choices. When in doubt about the proper pronoun or title, choose the correct and inclusive one or respectfully ask.
Apr 1, 2018 2:10 AM CDT
Heidi Brown: “Recently … I realized there is an evolving grammatical modernization to which
I must adjust.” Photograph by Krista Bonura.
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Law review editors do their best to comply with prevailing literary usage. In this quiz, the language hasn’t yet come close to accepting the “incorrect” choices as standard written English.
To Bryan Garner, editor-in-chief of Black’s Law Dictionary, Justice Antonin Scalia was a friend, a mentor, a collaborator and a fellow lover of words. In the wake of Scalia’s death on Feb. 13, 2016, Garner reflected back over their relationship, from their first brief introduction in 1988 to the trip they took to Asia together in the last weeks of Scalia’s life. Those reflections turned into his latest book, Nino and Me: My Unusual Friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia.
Before Neil M. Gorsuch became a U.S. Supreme Court justice, a study of potential Supreme Court nominees had rated him as more “Scalia-like” than Chief Justice John G. Roberts…
The ABA Journal wants to further facilitate conversations among lawyers about their profession. Therefore, we are revising our policy on unsolicited submissions to allow the legal profession to share, demonstrate…
“All styles are good,” Voltaire said, “except that which bores.” The good writer, in other words, frets a little about piquing the reader’s interest sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph—never descending into unremittingly dull stretches. The French even have a word for those dull stretches: longueurs.
Many writers mistakenly think it’s the beginning: They begin a disproportionate number of sentences with the grammatical subject, and they rarely depart from the subject-verb-object pattern. Boring legal writers create paragraphs of sentence after sentence beginning with a client’s or litigant’s name; interesting writers, by contrast, spice their prose with syntactic variety.
Bryan Garner: As a matter of linguistic epidemiology, if a malapropism becomes common enough, it becomes a nonstandard usage.” Photo by Winn Fuqua Photography
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Bryan Garner: “A question that every legal writer should ask is: ‘When will clarity come?’” Photograph by Winn Fuqua Photography.
" />
Heidi Brown: “Recently … I realized there is an evolving grammatical modernization to which
I must adjust.” Photograph by Krista Bonura.
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