The Lawyer's Guide to Writing Well

Tom Goldstein is former Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and author of Killing the Messenger: 100 Years of Media Criticism (1989) and The News at Any Cost: How Journalists Compromise Their Ethics to Shape the News (1985). Jethro K. Lieberman is Associate Dean, Professor of Law, and Director of the Writing Program at New York Law School, as well as Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. He is the coauthor of The Lawyer's Craft: An Introduction to Legal Analysis, Writing, Research, and Advocacy (2002) and author of A Practical Companion to the Constitution: How the Supreme Court Has Ruled on Issues from Abortion to Zoning (California, 1999).

Preface Part I. Why Lawyers Write Poorly 1. Does Bad Writing Really Matter? 2. Don't Make It Like It Was Part 2. The Process of Writing 3. Ten Steps to Writing 4. Of Dawdlers and Scrawlers, Pacers, and Plungers: Getting Started and Overcoming Blocks 5. The Mechanics of Getting It Down: From Quill Pens to Computers 6. Lessons from a Writing Audit 7. Lawyers as Publishers: Words Are Their Product Part 3. Managing Your Prose 8. Writing the Lead 9. Form, Structure, and Organization 10. Wrong Words, Long Sentences, and Other Mister Meaners 11. Revising Your Prose 12. Making Your Writing Memorable Notes Usage Notes An Editing Checklist Editing Exercises Suggested Revisions to Editing Exercises Reference Works Acknowledgments About the Authors Index