Short description
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.
Long description
Focusing on the argumentative, narrative, and descriptive style found in legal briefs and judicial opinions, The Elements of Legal Style (second edition) will be a thought provoking examination of effective argumentation in law.
Review
Publishers each year spew out writing books for law students by the dozen. Forget them. This is the best. We had not believed that this classic work could be substantially improved. The inimitable Mr. Garner has proven this belief wrong, and happily so. -ABA Appellate Practice Journal
Garner has given to the legal profession [an] extraordinary book....Invaluable. --South Dakota Law Review
Bryan Garner...is rapidly becoming--if he's not there already--America's foremost authority on language and the law. --Barrister
An expanded and more relaxed edition of his 1991 sourcebook. --William Safire, New York Times Magazine