Abstract

This is the third in a series of short, entertaining essays I've written about specific legal writing skills. Good legal writing is dense. Like poetry, it conveys lots of information in very few words. Judges don't have time to slough through a twenty-page discovery motion, and they shouldn't have to. Dense writing is likely to be read more carefully, and understood more thoroughly, than writing full of “fluff.” This essay contains ten tips for improving writing density. Examples include incessant editing, omitting phrases that serve no useful function (as a matter of fact), omitting redundancies (null and void), and using the active voice.