The Lawyer's Guide to Writing Well. Tom Goldstein

fact connect to that rule?).

      Again, the earlier you start to compose, the earlier you will encounter these blocks, and the more time you will have to do more research, interview more witnesses, talk to the client, or rethink some aspect of the problem. If you have waited until Sunday night, you will be denied these options, and your document will be empty—or late.

      You can also learn to write around small gaps in your knowledge. If you are missing a minor fact, one whose presence will not affect the concepts you are developing or their consequences, leave the fact checking for later. Once you begin to compose, you should not interrupt your train of thought to locate a date, a name, a middle initial, a line of cases, or the “right” word. Give yourself as much uninterrupted time to compose as possible.

      Here's a simple trick that journalists use. When they are momentarily stumped, they jot in “TK,” meaning “to come.” So a sentence in a first draft might read: “On May TK, a witness, TK Jones, saw the defendant step out of the drug store wearing, in Jones's words, ‘TK.’” The three missing points (the date, Jones's first name, and Jones's precise words) will not affect your argument, nor will their absence prevent you from proving your point. The important thing is to write. Don't hold back the big ideas; don't bog down in minutiae. Shut your door, turn off your phone, keep the radio low, tell your kids to play in the street, don't get up to sharpen a pencil or look up a word in the dictionary— just write.

      When you are composing, try not to even look at your notes. You have read through cases, previous memos, and the record of the case, and you have a general impression of the facts and the law. Let that impression suffice as you strive to make sense of the whole. Usually the important points will rise to the surface, and you'll avoid becoming bogged down in details. You can always go back later and add what's missing.

       Step 7. Reorganize.

      Let's assume you have solved your problem. You know why summary judgment should be granted, why your client's copyright has been infringed and how to prove it, why your client was not an inside trader. When your draft is done, you have completed your problem solving. Now it remains to communicate that solution to your readers.

      The first draft is your solution to the problem; the final draft must be the reader's. What may be clear to you may appear ambiguous to a reader who does not know how you think, how you arrived at what you wrote, and what you intended. Your words are the reader's only window into your thinking. When you edit your work, you must put yourself in the reader's place—you must come to your work without any preconceptions about its meaning.

       Your business as thinkers is to make plainer the way from some things to the whole of things.

      OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES JR.

      That is why you must edit late, why you must allow as many hours or days as possible to elapse after you have reorganized your document so that you still have time to prepare a final product on deadline. For as time passes, as your words grow colder, your memory of what you intended will dim. The halo of meaning will dissipate. After enough time has passed, you will read the document more as an outsider would, seeing the ambiguities and having to guess at the meaning. Edit a paper five minutes after you have drafted it, and you will not see how it flunks its ultimate mission, to communicate your solution to its readers. Edit five days (or even five hours) later, and you will begin to see which sentences and paragraphs are murky.

      Your schedule will never permit the lengthy intermission John Kenneth Galbraith enjoyed during his work on The New Industrial State. He was about to send the manuscript to his publisher when President Kennedy called, asking him to serve as ambassador to India. Galbraith put the manuscript in a drawer and returned to it two years later, appalled to discover deficiencies he had never imagined. The best thing for a writer, he concluded, was to accept a long overseas appointment.⁴

      Failing that, allow as much time as possible for the document to sit, out of sight and out of mind. That is another reason that you should begin your writing early. The earlier you write, the more time you will have to clear your mind before you begin editing.

      Editing well—transforming your writing from draft to polished prose—requires several steps; it cannot be done in a single sweep of the red pencil across all the pages. Your first concern is whether your document proceeds in a logical order. Read through the entire draft and look at the sequence of the major parts and the sequence of topics within each of the major parts. To help you keep track of the sequence, jot down in the margin of each paragraph its main points and compare these marginal headings throughout the document. You should quickly see what belongs together and what is out of order.

      Don't fret if much of your draft is jumbled. In fact, be suspicious if everything seems well ordered. Problem solving is messy, and as you compose you will rarely think of every issue and every fact in time to place them just where they belong.

      Move your sentences and paragraphs around. Draw arrows; use scissors and tape or the cut-and-paste features of your word processor. To spare yourself extra work, avoid the temptation at this point to correct grammar, sentence structure, punctuation, word choice, and the like. Concern yourself with organizing the whole. Fixing a sentence or paragraph before you move it will almost surely require you to modify it further once you have put it in a new place.

       Confusion of expression usually results from confusion of conception. The act of writing can help clarify one's thoughts. However, one should spare the reader having to repeat one's own extrication from confusion. The object is to be clear, not to show how hard it was to be so.

      GEOFFREY C. HAZARD JR.

       Step 8. Rewrite.

      Read through the document again. This time, look at the major elements: introduction, conclusion, topic sentences, headings, transitions. Does your introduction give your readers a road map for the entire document? Is your conclusion obvious and inescapable? Does each paragraph contain only one major point, does the topic sentence state that point, and do the sentences that follow make the point? Do your headings and transitions tie your paragraphs together? Will the reader understand why paragraph 24 follows paragraph 23?

      Although you know that you have solved the problem assigned to you, the reader remains to be convinced. You have satisfied yourself; now satisfy the reader.

       Step 9. Edit and edit again.

      In successive readings, look for specific types of writing problems: word order, word choice, grammar, passive voice, and other impediments to clear communication. Editing is not simple work, and you will not be able to identify and fix all the errors and difficulties in one pass. You should edit until you are satisfied, or until you run out of time. You should press on friends and colleagues as many of your documents as their time and patience will permit. No matter how long you let your own writing lie inert, you will still retain some faint wisp of meaning that your audience can never have. An outsider who tells you that something is unclear is therefore a valuable ally. There's little point in arguing with someone who says, “I don't understand this.” You may fully understand it, but your understanding is not the goal. If one person misunderstands, others may as well. Rewrite some more.

       Step 10. Proofread.

      When you have finished, either because you have exhausted your patience or your deadline is fast upon you, you must read the document at least once more, to ensure that the final product—the actual paper to be delivered to your reader—is as formally perfect as you can make it. In the days before word processors, proofreading was generally understood to be vital: typists and typesetters could make mistakes, so words might have been misspelled, punctuation might have been missing, a whole line might have been dropped.

      Today all too many writers are gulled into complacency by the seeming infallibility of the computer: what you see on the screen is presumably what you get on the printed page. Alas, the correspondence between screen and printer is not always complete, and the writer who refrains from proofreading forgoes one last opportunity to perfect what the reader will see. You would not press a suit for work and then forget to put it on before leaving