Stop Riding Behind the Fog of Jargon - 
by Pedro Luis de la Fuente (by 2009 participant from Argentina)

Stop for a minute, take a deep breath and think about you as a lawyer in a modern democratic society. Now, let me share with you the following passage of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels around the remote nations of the World:“…the profession of law forms a society of man brought up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose that white is black and black is white according as they are paid... This society has a peculiar cant and jargon of its own that no other mortal can understand and wherein all their laws are written, which they take special care to multiply…

Now, take another breath and think again about your role as a lawyer. The words a lawyer selects and the arguments a lawyer crafts make an everyday difference around us. The use of plain language will allow us to communicate our daily quest for justice to an audience that is unfamiliar with legal jargon and technical terms we normally use. With a simple and clear communication skill, we will be able to improve people’s understanding and enforcement of their rights, and we will serve justice in a better way.

Ideas and words are the tools of a lawyer. I ask myself why then we lawyers hide ourselves behind the fog of jargon? It seems to me that we are trying to reserve for ourselves medieval phrases and formulas which would otherwise be plain words and techniques that anyone could apply today. Maybe we fear too much to lose our historical preeminent role in society.

This year, the Academy for American and International Law gave us the privilege to attend a three-day course on legal writing. All the lectures were given by Mr. Bryan Garner, a well known authority on legal writing in plain English.

Mr. Garner encouraged us to write in a language ‘understood of the people’ and also to develop a writing style of our own. As Bertrand Russell once said, “…a style is not good unless it is an intimate and almost involuntary expression of the personality of the writer, and then only if the writer’s personality is worth expressing…”

It is a simple truth that good legal writing involves grammar and punctuation. Then, a good bit of advice is to go back and review our grammar textbooks. This will give us the ability to master our language and make it to say what we want it to say in a shorter and more intelligible manner.

Once you master the language, you are then able to move forward. Developing ideas, phrasing your sentences, and choosing words are the most basic stages involved in writing. It is critical that you preserve the speed, clarity, and impact of your document. By all means, do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end.

With Mr. Garner’s help, we were able to improve our skills of structuring ideas while doing  research. The use of a whirlybird in a blank paper may be a simple method, but it enables you to find both the strongest and weakest points. We focused in keeping ideas in a logical sequence and facts in a chronological order. In this regard, it may be useful to divide the document into sections or even smaller parts as needed.

We lawyers normally try to explain our clever solutions in complicated manners. It seems difficult to keep the average sentence length to about 20 words. It takes effort, but it is not impossible. Mr. Garner also emphasized that the subject, verb, and object should be kept together toward the beginning of the sentence. A final tip - always prefer active voice over the passive.

Plain writing is mostly choosing the right words. In this sense, Mr. Garner encouraged us to hate the simplifiable jargon. Back in my law firm, I now try to avoid all kind of new fangled acronyms as I battle everyday to simplify wordy phrases in my legal work. I have learned that it is better to use strong and precise verbs instead of recurring to the general verbs (e.g., to be). By all means, I try to avoid doublets and triplets: “just say it well and say it once”.

I am now consciously trying to make everything I write, polished and speak-able. In my opinion, it makes no sense to write in a jargon only to be understood by the ‘erudite’ few. I could not care less. Not only has jargon created a distance between attorneys and clients, but also it has caused a great deal of confusion amongst ordinary people. If we want to foster respect for and knowledge of the law and our democratic institutions, it is our duty to make it possible for ordinary people to understand our legal system. A modern democratic society, including my own nation, demands the meaningful participation of individual citizens.

Lawyers of the world: stop riding behind the fog of jargon and help us to build a new society in which our legal system and the goal of doing justice are understood by our community.