The Elements of Legal Style

With expanded coverage in this new edition, The Elements of Legal Style features additional sections, many more examples, and a thoroughly researched appendix that contains 80 major statements on prose style--what it is and how to attain it.

Inspired by Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, this book clearly (often wittily) explains the full range of what legal writers need to know: mechanics, word choice, structure, and rhetoric, as well as all the special conventions that legal writers should follow in using headings, defined terms, quotations, and many other devices. Garner also provides abundant examples from the best legal writers of yesterday and today, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Clarence Darrow, Frank Easterbrook, and Antonin Scalia.

If you want to make your writing clearer, more precise, more persuasive, and above all more stylish, The Elements of Legal Style offers the surest--and the most enjoyable--means to that end.

Bryan A. Garner is a best-selling legal author with more than a dozen titles to his credit, including A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, The Winning Brief, A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, and Legal Writing in Plain English. He is also the editor in chief of Black's Law Dictionary in all its current editions.