Set in Style

Each of the following contains some grammatical error(s). Can you identify the error(s)?

McKee Nelson has one of the most prominent teams of tax attorneys in the country, comprised of accomplished business lawyers with tax expertise who represent a diverse range of clients.

McKee Nelson’s Litigation/Enforcement Group is comprised of more than 60 lawyers with extensive experience representing clients with regard to complex disputes . . . .

Because the tax credits and other tax benefits often comprise a significant portion of the economic return . . . .

Be the first to correctly identify the error(s), and win a nifty prize — one that sets you apart from most others.

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Note: Not long after our winner won this contest, the folks at McKee Nelson revised their copy — they replaced comprise with compose. In their haste, they introduced another error!

Professional publishers do this: before they publish copy, they prove proof it.

This is a pretty straightforward task. It’s the sort of thing most concientious conscientious sots sorts learned in middle school (i.e., before you submit a paper, review it).

It’s a very basic, and important, taks task. Forget to proof your copy before it’s published, and you just might find people talking about you (in a not-so-good way) the next day.

Now that we’re clear on that, let’s talk about SEO: search engine optimization.
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From “DEFYING PRECEDENT: THE ARMY WRITING STYLE” authored by Major Thomas Keith Emswiler:

 
Why can’t lawyers, who are among the best educated in any community, write well? Why can’t law professors, who are among the best educated in the legal community, write well? The answer is reliance on precedent — the lawyer’s bread and butter. What law student hasn’t looked at a sentence such as: “Accordingly, substantive equality should be measured by equality in fact; the process must be equal but the results must also reflect the effort to remedy the effects of a century of official discrimination,” and aspired to write in a similar manner? Reliance on precedent leads to poor writing.
 

In our last post, we considered the order of verbs and the adverbs used to modify them. And we considered an easy and reliable way of calculating the colloquial quotient of the order of verbs and adverbs.

Here, we consider something closely related — the myth of the split verb.
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A common error many attorneys make when writing client alerts is this: they use exactly the same style of writing that they use in their daily work.

But that doesn’t work very well. When you write a brief, someone else has to read it. But when you write a client alert, no one has to read it.

If you want your alert to attract an audience, write it so it’s as easy to read as can be. The easier you make it for readers to read what you wrote, the more likely they are to do just that (and recommend what you wrote to others).
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You’ve got a deadline. You’re reviewing your work, and then you realize an important section begins with this*:

A California Court of Appeal recently interpreted the state’s Song-Beverly Credit Act to allow merchants to require extra personal identifying information from customers to be recorded on credit card slips when giving a customer credit for returned merchandise. The statute prohibits retailers from requiring customers to provide extra personal identification information, such as a driver’s license or Social Security Number, on credit card transaction slips, or using slips which have pre-printed spaces for such information.

Once you realize this, what do you do?

A. Read on and realize what comes next?
B. Read it again?
C. Edit it?

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In the past few years, a number of large law firms have named a few partners as editors of practice-area newsletters (and of other publications, like practice-area blogs). And that makes perfect sense because the authors of those newsletters need what all authors need — editors to review their work. But what do these lawyer/editors do?
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The following description of a firm’s practice appears on the inside front cover of this brochure.

That’s the actual size of the printed copy. Can you read it (without a magnifying glass)?

OK. Suppose you use a magnifying glass so the copy appears like so:

The copy’s much easier to read, but no matter how much you magnify it, you’ll always have trouble reading it because the spaces between the words are just a fraction of what they should be.

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Now, why would a law firm produce promotional copy that people can barely read?

1. The person who set the copy was a youngster with no training in typography.
2. That person thought it would be “way cool” to set the copy very way tight (and in tiny, gray type).
3. The firm doesn’t much care about this sort of thing. 

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Take a look at the HTML version of this client alert from Mayer Brown.

Interesting, is it not?

For a mild surprise, click the link to the PDF version of that alert and see what pops up.

This anonymously authored Note in the Harvard Law Review has gotten lots of attention recently.

Here’s a bit of it:

Now, suppose Ms. Anonymous engaged Mr. Wordsmith to edit that article?

Then it might have turned out like so:

Less wordy; less convoluted; more pleasing to readers, and the author seems like a fairly good writer.

Look . . . you just can’t function as your own editor. No one can. Not even editors!

It’s like trying to cut your own hair.