The Lawyer's Essential Guide to Writing is a readable, concrete guide to contemporary legal writing. Based on Marie Buckley's years of experience coaching lawyers, this book provides a systematic approach to all forms of written communication, from memoranda and briefs to e-mail and blogs. The book sets forth three principles for powerful writing and shows how to apply those principles to develop a clean and confident style.
This easy-to-use primer lays out 135 principles of clear writing, dictation, tone, grammar, syntax, organization, and format. Filled with before-and-after examples and illustrations from the legal world, the book is both a welcome refresher for the practicing lawyer and an indispensable reference for anyone in the legal profession.
This best-selling book outlines the causes and consequences of bad legal writing and prescribes straightforward, easy-to-apply remedies that will make your writing readable. Usage notes address lawyers' most common errors, and editing exercises allow readers to test their skills, making this an invaluable tool for practicing lawyers as well as a sensible grounding for law students. New sections in this edition: - Getting to the point - Communicating digitally - Writing persuasively - Twenty-five common mistakes"--Provided by publisher.
"Like the popular earlier editions, the fourth edition of A Lawyer Writes puts the reader in the place of a first-year attorney faced with real-life assignments. In doing so, it teaches law students not only how to succeed in law school, but also how to succeed in the practice of law. Using graphics and visual samples that demonstrate both effective and ineffective analytical techniques, this updated edition illustrates best practices for objective legal analysis and provides an overview of the transition from objective to persuasive writing. The content and examples in the fourth edition have been supplemented, updated, and reorganized to provide an easy-to-use, step-by-step approach for learning legal analysis and objective writing. A Lawyer Writes aims to provide clear and concrete instruction about each facet of legal analysis, using the same order students will follow when performing the tasks in legal practice. The textbook also provides the relevant theory and background behind the choices attorneys make in their legal writing, enabling students to transfer those techniques to future settings. Speaking to its readers in a straightforward manner, A Lawyer Writes communicates essential skills and theories students can use throughout a lifetime of legal practice"--
Now updated for 2015! The best, most comprehensive guide for writers is now revised and updated, with new sections on ebooks, self-publishing, crowd-funding through Kickstarter, blogging, increasing visibility via online marketing, micropublishing, the power of social media and author websites, and more—making The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published more vital than ever for anyone who wants to mine that great idea and turn it into a successfully published book. Written by experts with twenty-five books between them as well as many years’ experience as a literary agent (Eckstut) and a book doctor (Sterry), this nuts-and-bolts guide demystifies every step of the publishing process: how to come up with a blockbuster title, create a selling proposal, find the right agent, understand a book contract, and develop marketing and publicity savvy. Includes interviews with hundreds of publishing insiders and authors, including Seth Godin, Neil Gaiman, Amy Bloom, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Lopate, plus agents, editors, and booksellers; sidebars featuring real-life publishing success stories; sample proposals, query letters, and an entirely updated resources and publishers directory.
McMurtry-Chubb received the 2021 Thomas F. Blackwell Memorial Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Legal Writing. The award is is presented annually to a person who has made an outstanding contribution to improve the field of Legal Writing. One of the most common questions that prospective law students ask is "What is the best major to prepare me to study law?" The most common answer given by college advisors is "Any major." The perception of law school as a "free for all" accessible to students of any major sets students up for the confusion they experience in learning the law and legal skills. When students begin their legal education, they are taken out of their undergraduate and graduate disciplines and placed into the legal discipline without context for how their disciplinary education relates to their legal education. This leads to many of the frustrations that new law students have with law school, especially in their legal writing classes. Legal Writing in the Disciplines re-conceptualizes law in its disciplinary context. The text is designed to effectively communicate legal analysis and writing skills to pre-law and new law students using the language of their undergraduate and graduate majors. Legal writing is disciplinary writing, not just another form of technical writing. Law school is a disciplinary community. Integration into any disciplinary community occurs through the processes of reading and writing. The first chapter of the text details all aspects of the processes used to create practical legal writing (case briefs, notes, outlines and MindMaps, legal memos, legal briefs, exam outlines and exam answers). The five remaining chapters are divided into five broad disciplinary categories: Science, Social Science, Arts, Humanities and Business. Each chapter contains discipline-specific instruction on creating the different types of legal writing. The chapter sections lead the reader through the resolution of a legal problem through legal writing and provide answers for self-check with discipline-specific explanations on an interactive CD-ROM. The CD-ROM allows students to load PDFs (the materials, exercises, model answers, and case files to which the text refers) onto an iPad or other tablet for flexibility and ease of use in practicing legal writing skills. Additionally, the materials, exercises, and model answers are annotated in color with discipline-specific explanations to guide students as they assimilate new legal writing skills. A teacher's manual accompanies the text and features semester and quarter course planning options, learning outcomes and performance criteria for each week, lecture notes for each week, in-class exercises and supporting materials, and assessment rubrics for all assignments and skills. The rubrics are keyed to the weekly learning outcomes and performance criteria. An interactive CD-ROM with case files for a legal memo, legal brief, and other instructional materials is included.
"Indispensable to international students studying U.S. law, Culture to Culture explains the U.S. legal system's rhetorical preferences, linguistic specializations, and current conventions. Readers will be able to learn comfortably and quickly what U.S. audiences expect. The book provides students with U.S. legal tools for reading texts, analyzing problems, researching sources, organizing analytical patterns, and writing in acceptable legal styles. Covering a broad range of topics and questions, it introduces current conventions through a variety of legal texts, including letters, memos, transactional documents, briefs, exams, and scholarly papers. Culture to Culture will prepare international lawyers to be researchers and writers in both U.S. law schools and U.S. legal practices, or to return to their own countries with an analytical perspective on how U.S. lawyers research, analyze, negotiate, and write."--BOOK JACKET.
