The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style (2d Ed.)
by Bryan A. Garner, Jeff Newman, Tiger Jackson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Bryan A. Garner, Jeff Newman, Tiger JacksonEdition: Spiral-bound
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-07-18
ISBN: 0314168915
Number of pages: 510
Publisher: West
Book Reviews of The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style (2d Ed.)
Book Review: (Almost) everything you should have wanted to know about legal writing, but didn't ask
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a wonderful reference work on legal style--comprehensive, authoritative, well organized, and genuinely readable. It covers an incredible range of topics: punctuation, page layout, typography, spelling, grammar, usage, and more. It makes specific stylistic recommendations for many different types of legal documents, including business correspondence, research memos, pleadings, appellate briefs, and judicial opinions, to name just a few. And it's useful for anybody who has anything to do with creating legal documents, from judges and senior lawyers, to raw associates and law students, to legal secretaries; it would even be helpful to pro se litigants (as other reviewers have noted). I really wish that Amazon provided a "look inside" that showed the table of contents - the book covers an amazing amount of ground.
It's too bad that practitioners used to obfuscatory legalese, or who needlessly produce ugly, poorly written, unreadable documents, won't ever buy, much less read, this book. There's a lot of lousy legal writing churned out every day--bad not just in the sense that a writing teacher or design and typography professional wouldn't like it, but bad in the sense of being hard to read and understand and therefore, in the end, unpersuasive. This book is an antidote.
I recommend all of Bryan Garner's books, but this is the one to start with--it's the most general, and the most broadly useful. (If you write briefs, as I do, the second one to get is The Winning Brief). Every once in a while I would quibble with one of the rules Garner espouses, but for every such rule this book must have ten others that have taught me that, much to my chagrin, I (and almost every other lawyer I know) have been doing something wrong, without realizing it, for many years. I wish I'd discovered Garner much earlier; he's really helped me improve my writing and the way my documents look. Law offices ought to make The Redbook standard issue. That's not going to happen, sad to say, but I can't think of a better, more useful book to give to new lawyers about to start their first legal jobs. Or to senior lawyers who recognize that they don't know everything there is to know about legal writing.
One downside to this book is that, because it is so comprehensive, it sometimes will seem a little too basic. If you're really a good legal writer you may want to start with one of Garner's more "advanced" books. But you'd be amazed at how many legal writers seem not to have learned what is taught in high school English classes. <g> And in any case, this book covers much important stuff that just isn't taught in law school, much less high school, and that most legal writers don't manage to pick up along the way.
Highly recommended.
Summary of The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style (2d Ed.)
Provides a comprehensive guide to the essential rules of legal writing. Unlike most style or grammar guides, it focuses on the special needs of legal writers. answering a wide spectrum of questions about grammar and style both rules as well as exceptions. Also gives detailed, authoritative advice on punctuation, capitalization, spelling, footnotes, and citations, with illustrations in legal context. Designed for law students, law professors, practicing lawyers and judges, the work emphasizes the ways in which legal writing differs from other styles of technical writing. Its how to sections deal with editing and proofreading, numbers and symbols, and overall document design.Law Practice Books
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