Plain English in ten little words

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We all know bad drafting when we see it — it will transport some from a resting state of tranquility to the verge of physical violence, but for legions of others it is a toasty duvet under which they will gladly slip — but all the same it is hard to pin down exactly what is wrong with it.

Many of the “tells” are short, small, inoffensive words.

In the modern style, then, I offer you the JC’s guide to turgid drafting, through ten short words.

• May: Avoid redundancy. The parties may, but are not obliged to. “Nothing in the foregoing will prevent parties from —”. Don’t confer entitlements that the parties had in any case. Don’t say a thing more than is necessary. Don’t over-communicate. Less is more.
• By: A dead giveaway to the passive voice. The passive should be avoided by all good writers wherever it is found to be possible Good writers avoid the passive voice when they can. It lacks energy. It evades responsibility. Write in the active, with energy, clearly assigning responsibility for action.
• Of: A harmless preposition placing one thing in relation to another, “of” is often also a red flag for passive constructions:

“in the event of harm to the interests of the client by the broker...”

(did you see that by in there?) rather than:

“if the broker harms the client’s interests...”

Likewise, it signposts nominalisations:

“I shall initiate the termination of the scheme”

rather than:

“I will terminate the scheme”.

• Is: Like “of”, we often hook up the commonest verb to longer infinitives and nouns, making ugly passives and nominalisations. It is also a gateway drug to cluttered syntax. We legal eagles are so acclimatised to writing this way we barely notice when we do it: I just caught myself writing:

“What I want is a document that is clear, plain and is understandable.”

Take out the existential verb and you get:

“I want a clear, plain, understandable document.”

• Shall: Fusty, old, imprecise language. Herewith, hereof,
• And/or: You are a professional writer: write like one. Be confident. Avoid nervous language in the first place, not doubt later on. Unless otherwise agreed; write to avoid doubt in the first place (though in my cantankerous opinion doubt is in any case underrated).
• Verb: complicated sentence constructions are aided and abetted by boring, colourless verbs: (because such colourless verbs (give, do, be, make, have, and the worst of all, effect) require colouring, usually an accompanying noun that could itself have been a verb, or an adverb, whose definition is “a word you use only where you can’t think of a better verb”
• Including: Parentheticals that, by definition, add nothing: including, without limitation, for the avoidance of doubt.
• Judge: For whom are you writing? Not posterity, not a judge, not to cover your backside. See: purpose.
• Deemed: Avoid legal tics and Latinisms: Things that you might be able to justify on tendentious logical grounds, but which don’t make a damn of difference in the real world. So it might be true that a redemption amount is “an amount equal to the final price” — yes, it is true the redemption amount isn’t, from a brutalised ontological perspective, the final price; in the conceptual scheme they are different things, but they’re identical, and you lose nothing, except a few dead scales of pedantic skin, by saying the “redemption amount is the final price”. Likewise “this shall be deemed to be that” what, practically is the difference between “being deemed to be something”, or (worse) “being deemed to be an amount equal to something” and just “being something”? But the principle remains: unless there is a hard-edged legal, accounting or tax distinction between a tedious and a plain articulation, use the plain one.

See also

• Nominalisation and adjectivisation
• Writing for a judge
• Purpose