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Legal writing workshop for my pals at PALS

May 10, 2011 Legalese

If you don’t know PALS, you should. It’s short for Practicing Attorneys for Law Students, a mentoring organization for minority law students in the NY area. I lurv PALS for many reasons, not least because the very first writing workshop I ever did was for PALS. In 2004, when I was just launching my business, PALS [...]

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How do you spell Libyan dictator?

March 23, 2011 Uncategorized

Apparently there are no wrong answers. This image from Wikipedia illustrates the many ways his name can be spelled in transliteration. I love that the only thing everyone agrees on is that his first name starts with M and ends with r. (from Wikipedia via ilovecharts)

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Misunderstood punctuation mark explained: semi-colon is just a transvestite hermaphrodite.

March 23, 2011 Uncategorized

Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. Kurt Vonnegut I don’t agree with the prohibition (lawyers need semi-colons!) but love the anthropomorphizing (and so un-P.C.) characterization. Also love the dig about showing off. The same could be said of my use of [...]

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I thought this was an Onion headline when I first read it.

March 20, 2011 Uncategorized

(from theyuniversity via econblues2011)

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Legal writing under the influence. (Yes, that influence.)

March 18, 2011 Uncategorized

Given that it’s Friday, it’s warm and sunny (finally!), and it’s 5:30 (and still warm and sunny), it’s good time for me to share this tragicomic triptych of tweets I stumbled upon when I ran a search for tweets that contain the words “legal writing,” hoping to get a sense of how the subject might [...]

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Why "blog"? No, those aren’t the dreaded gratuitous quotation marks.

March 18, 2011 Uncategorized

And no, I don’t mean what can blogging do for you, emotionally, financially, existentially or otherwise. What I mean is: where does the word blog come from? As promised in yesterday’s Blog you and your momma, too post, here’s the etymology, according to the late, great William Safire: Blog is a shortening of Web log. [...]

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St. Patrick would be proud

March 18, 2011 Uncategorized

And here I thought the Brits had better command of English than we do. (image from weirdosinmyway)

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Blog you and your momma, too!

March 16, 2011 Uncategorized

One of the (many) quirky quirks of English is that nouns tend to gradually morph into verbs, to the horror of many. Johnson, the Economist’s fantastic language blog, has a great post about the verbification of the word blog — complete with graphs from Google’s wonderful Ngram Viewer, which pls clarify has raved about before. In response to [...]

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Yes you can!

March 16, 2011 Uncategorized

End a sentence with a preposition, that is. Merriam-Webster, dictionary of record and my former employer, has a series of Ask the Editor videos up on YouTube. This one debunks the don’t-end-a-sentence-with-a-preposition myth, and strikes just the right tone of smart, sly and useful. Emily Brewster, the associate editor who delivers the goods news, is everything you’d [...]

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