Writing to Win - The Legal Writer

Informationen zum Autor Steven D. Stark Klappentext From a master teacher and writer, a fully revised and updated edition of the results-oriented approach to legal writing that is clear, that persuades-and that WINS. More than almost any profession, the law has a deserved reputation for opaque, jargon-clogged writing. Yet forceful writing is one of the most potent weapons of legal advocacy. In this new edition of Writing to Win, Steven D. Stark, a former lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, who has inspired thousands of aspiring and practicing lawyers, applies the universal principles of powerful, vigorous prose to the job of making a legal case-and winning it. Writing to Win focuses on the writing of lawyers, not judges, and includes dozens of examples of effective (and ineffective) real-life legal writing-as well as compelling models drawn from advertising, journalism, and fiction. It deals with the challenges lawyers face in writing, from organization to strengthening and editing prose; offers incisive ways of improving arguments; addresses litigation and technical writing in all its forms; and covers the writing attorneys must perform in their daily practice, from email memos to briefs and contracts. Each chapter opens with a succinct set of rules for easy reference. With new sections on client communication and drafting affidavits, as well as updated material throughout, Writing to Win is the most practical and efficacious legal-writing manual available. Introduction to the New Edition Good writing is timeless. Except, of course, when it’s not. Periodically over the last ten years, I thought about revising my original book on legal and professional writing— Writing to Win: The Legal Writer. But as egocentric as it might seem, for a while I never found much I would change. Sure, some of the references marked the book as a product of a slightly earlier time—the references to the O. J. Simpson trial, Kenneth Starr, or “vice-president Al Gore.” But for the most part, the book seemed to illustrate the maxim that the principles of good writing don’t change all that much over time. A good brief in 1965—much less in the late 1990s when the book was written—is still a good brief today. Ditto for complaint writing, contracts, and even judicial opinions. And yet: In a variety of ways, writing in many parts of the legal and business worlds has changed more since that book was written about a decade ago than in any comparable period over the last five centuries. “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us,” wrote the media theorist Marshall McLuhan a generation ago. Technological changes transform not only the methods of communication but their style as well. The invention of the printing press centuries ago not only altered the dissemination of information in Western cultures, it changed the way people spoke and the way they wrote—and there were constant complaints about it then, just like now. In our time, of course, the recent development of computers, the Internet, and then smart phones (and all their manifestations, such as the iPad) has begun to do much the same thing. It’s undeniable that writing within the office and for clients is dramatically different than it was a decade ago. Whether we recognize it or not, that means that legal analysis and the ways we approach business problems have shifted as well. These revolutionary changes are one of the subjects of this new edition of the book. In part, that makes this volume a primer on how to communicate successfully in this brave new world. Writing effective e-mails and shorter memos are skills very much at odds with the tools we acquire in school—where the goal is usually to be expansive and detailed as we display our knowledge in all its minutiae. These new forms of communication are also very different from the written and oral tools one needed to master to be a good lawyer or executive...

Product details

• Authors: Steven D Stark, Steven D. Stark
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 24.04.2012
• EAN: 9780307888716
• ISBN: 978-0-307-88871-6
• No. of pages: 303
• Dimensions: 135 mm x 210 mm x 20 mm
• Series: Crown
• Subject: Social sciences, law, business > Law > General, dictionaries