Minnesota Lawyer

You’re casually reading someone else’s document. You spot a mistake. Do you mention it?

As we brace for the tsunami of extraordinary effort and sacrifice that will be required of us all, should we still care about choosing the right word, or crafting a memorable sentence, or proofreading for typos?

Recently I asked lawyers about the piece of legal writing that they most wanted to improve.

Time to take a fresh look at a hot issue in grammar nerd circles: the use of emoji in legal writing.

When you write, do you quote? Do you quote other people who have quoted? Are some of those people judges?

A late hour in a dark office. A sleep-deprived lawyer squints at a glowing flatscreen, her keyboard pattering.

We use the indicative mood to express fact or opinion. We use the imperative mood to give directions or make requests. We use the subjunctive mood to convey, among other things, possibilities, hypotheticals, or conditions that do not exist.

Toward a Unified Field Theory of Commas, Part 2

The comma is perhaps the most-used, most-abused punctuation mark in the toolbox: The New Yorker loves it, readers crave it, writers fear it, and I have avoided it. Until now.

A semicolon is a comma with a period on top; you may recognize it from its work in statutes, contracts, Dickens, and the “winky” emoticon, into which it morphs whenever it’s placed on the inside of a parenthesis.