Legal English: The Importance Of Legal Writing

There is a huge contrast between legal English and everyday spoken English. One is meant to convey precise information while the other is used to freely communicate with one another in any context and dialect. Although each one is used in everyday situations, one is more complex than the other.

Legal English is more precise with its information and the type words it uses as to interpret the information as straight forward as possible. Wydick, a lawyer from California, wrote in his book that, “When the common law was transplanted to America, the writing style of the old English lawyers came with it.” Wydick goes on to say that “lawyers cannot write in plain English, they use eight words to convey what two words can and because they try to be

It sounds easy to write but many lawyers have trouble writing it because of the attention to detail it requires. Legal English is primarily made up of lawyerisms. “Lawyerisms are words like aforementioned, whereas, res gestae, and hereinafter. They give writing a legal smell, but they carry little or no legal substance.” (Wydick, 739) Legal writing has received a lot of criticism with it’s very particular style. With that being said, many lawyers are now creating manuals on how to write legal documents in plain English. For example, Garner also states that when writing it’s best to stay away from “fancy words, challenge vague words and eschew euphemisms.” By doing this, the lawyer will be writing to his/her client rather than to a judge. An example on how this can be done is given by Wydick, “In every English sentence are two kinds of words: working words and glue words. The working words carry the meaning of the sentence. While the others are glue words: of, and the. These glue words hold the working words together to form a proper English sentence. But when you

There is no formal form when using spoken English. People tend to speak quickly with “slang” terms whereas legal English is meant to be read slow and concise so as to understand all the legal lingo. Gillian Brown states in her book, Listen to Spoken English, that, “most public speakers have adapted a more ‘chatty’ style in which the speaker tends to project a more friendly, accessible image.” Spoken English has very much strayed away from the slow precise speech that legal English is very much comprised of but rather an informal conversation among friends. One thing that spoken English has that isn’t conveyed well through legal writing is the rhythm that creates it. “The rhythm of English is based on the contrast of stressed and unstressed syllables.” (Brown, 42) The use of stressed and unstressed syllables helps the listener understand the context and meaning behind what is being spoken. This is something that can’t be interpreted through writing. During informal speech, “the speaker is concentrating on what he is saying rather than how he is saying it.” (Brown, 53) Which means that the speaker will simply try to get their point across as efficiently as