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"Really informative; gives me incentive to pay attention to my writing."

“The nuts and bolts of the English language comes alive through wit and historical quips.”

“Ron Hofer is Excellent. Nobody has ever made grammar so enjoyable.”

“This presentation should be required viewing for all criminal defense lawyers.”

 

COURSES / SEMINARS

MAKING YOUR WRITING MORE READABLE

Whether you're writing for a court, a client
or another attorney, two rules always apply:

1. The customer is always right.
2. The customer is not you.

In other words, if your reader doesn't "get" what you've written, you've failed as a writer. And the price for such failure is often high.

This program will help you learn to see your writing as the reader will see it. You will gain valuable insight into how written English works. And by learning what all readers have in common, you will acquire new tools to make your writing more convincing, understandable and effective.

TOPICS TO BE COVERED

  • How legal writing is both different from and similar to other kinds of writing.
  • How different kinds of words affect readers differently.
  • Which words readers "see" and which they don't.
  • How clarity helps persuade.
  • How to shorten sentences without
    losing content.
  • What readers look for when they read.
  • How readers decode what you write.
  • What gets lost between the words in your head and the words on your page.
  • What causes readers to misunderstand and / or lose interest.
  • How to diagnose and correct your writing problems.

JUDICIAL WRITING

BASIC JUDICIAL WRITING
Literate adults intuitively know much about how language works, but few write from a full awareness of the structure of language. This seminar builds upon the participants' innate language skills and provides them the next level of understanding of the workings
of language, enabling them to write from a fuller sense of just how words fit together and how that fit affects the reader.

A half-day or whole day Basic Judicial Writing seminar takes judges' intuitive sense of grammar and syntax and brings it up to a conscious level by fully explaining and illustrating the active voice, the passive voice, the being verb, expletives and nominalizations. The benefits and drawbacks of each is discussed and exemplified by examples taken from judicial and legal writing, political speech, the media, advertising and American culture.

Focusing on sentence structure, the seminar explains how certain sentence structures work best in findings of fact, while others are more appropriate to the complexity of legal analysis.

OPINION STRUCTURE
This half-day (or less) seminar focuses on the various parts of a judicial opinion and what its various readerships expect from it. Topics include:

  • The most important audiences for an opinion
  • Introductory paragraphs as a microcosm
  • Legally relevant vs. background facts
  • Marshalling fact to support analysis
  • The dangers of paraphrasing the law

WORKSHOP
Building on the skills gained in the Basic Judicial Writing Seminar, the Workshop pairs up participants to edit selected sentences chosen from actual judicial opinions.

LEGAL WRITING

BASIC LEGAL WRITING
Literate adults intuitively know much about how language works, but few write from a full awareness of the structure of language. This seminar builds upon the participants' innate language skills and provides them the next level of understanding of the workings of language, enabling them to write from a fuller sense of just how words fit together and how that fit affects the reader.

A half-day or whole day Basic Legal Writing seminar takes lawyers' intuitive sense of grammar and syntax and brings it up to a conscious level by fully explaining and illustrating the active voice, the passive voice, the being verb, expletives and nominalizations.  The relative benefits and drawbacks of each is discussed and exemplified by examples taken from judicial and legal writing, political speech, advertising and American culture.

Focusing on sentence structure, the seminar
explains how certain sentence structures work best in writing facts, while others are more appropriate to the complexity of legal analysis.

WORKSHOP
Building on the skills gained in the Basic Legal Writing Seminar, the Workshop pairs up participants to edit selected sentences chosen from actual judicial opinions and legal briefs.

sGOVERNMENTAL WRITING

BASIC AGENCY WRITING
Literate adults intuitively know much about how language works, but few write from a full awareness of the structure of language. This seminar builds upon the participants' innate language skills and provides them the next level of understanding of the workings
of language, enabling them to write from a fuller sense of just how words fit together
and how that fit affects the reader.

A half-day or whole day Basic Agency Writing seminar takes participants' intuitive sense of grammar and syntax and brings it up to a conscious level by fully explaining and illustrating the active voice, the passive voice, the being verb, expletives and nominalizations.  The relative benefits and drawbacks of each is discussed and exemplified by examples taken from judicial and legal writing, political speech, advertising and American culture.

AVOIDING BUREAUCRATIC WRITING
This seminar addresses the hazards peculiar to administrative agency prose, such as the institutional passive, the murk of U.S.C and C.F.R. provisions, boilerplate in letters and orders, and action nouns or nominalizations. Participants also discuss what "message" they want their writing to send the reader. This seminar works best if the agency provides writing samples in advance. These are then discussed and dissected in class, with care taken to keep the particular authors' anonymity.



     
Milwaukee