📚✨ Discover the 11 Capital Sins of Legal Writing! 🚨📝
Author: Andrés Felipe Rivas
in collaboration with WOW Legal Experience and Copernico
The Easy Reading Law initiative is extremely powerful in its potential impact on the law and those who practice it. 🌟 However, from a practical standpoint, turning this initiative into law would be unfeasible. It’s highly likely that judicial and administrative officials would neglect it, even if easy reading formats are established. The reason: those of us in the legal field continue to commit, in the words of Diego López, eleven (11) capital sins that hinder reading comprehension. 😰
If we delve deeper, I feel it’s unnecessary to turn this initiative into law to impact the law and those who practice it. The correct use of technology, Legal Design, and education are the tools that can achieve this impact. 🌟 They are the ones who can truly turn these capital sins of legal writing into applicable principles.
First sin: Long Sentences Disconnect the Reader
In grammar, the construction of sentences is crucial because it provides the necessary structure for the effective communication of an idea. Sentences are the basic units of language communication, ensuring the clear transmission of a message. 🌟 Therefore, the construction of sentences in texts should have the following characteristics to engage the reader and make them understand the content: 🌟
A. Effectively communicate information;
B. Facilitate the reader’s understanding of an idea due to its grammatical structure;
C. Connect the reader through text fluency;
D. Construct coherent texts;
A common sin found in legal texts is the use of extremely long sentences. These automatically have an adverse effect on the reader: disconnection 😓. The lack of text fluency hampers the understanding of the idea because it fatigues the reader. According to López Medina, the word limit to facilitate the understanding of a sentence should be 20. However, the average number of words per sentence in Colombian legal texts is almost 3 times the limit. Consequently, Colombian legal texts generally contain a disconnection factor that hinders readers’ comprehension. 📚🚫
🌈💼✨ To turn this sin into a principle, I feel that we must consciously practice constructing fluid sentences. That is, write them in a way that they are easily readable. In this way, we aim to connect the reader regardless of the complexity of the topic.
💡💪 Along with WOW LEGAL, we have let creativity soar to integrate these principles. Ask us how we can help your legal teams flow with their writing.
🌐👩⚖️👨⚖️ #LegalWriting #ConnectandWrite #EasyReading #WOWLEGAL #TaxLitigation #LegalTech #LegalDesign #EducationInLaw #WritingPrinciples #ColombianLegalSystem #Readability #LegalInnovation #Lawyers
La versión en español puede encontrarse aquí:📚✨ ¡Descubre los 11 Pecados Capitales de la Redacción Jurídica! 🚨📝 : Segundo pecado: párrafos cortos, desorientan al lector
