📚✨ Discover the 11 Deadly Sins of Legal Writing! 🚨📝
Author: Andrés Felipe Rivas
in collaboration with WOW Legal Experience and Copernico
The Easy Reading Law project holds enormous potential to impact both the legal realm and those who practice it. However, its conversion into law from a practical perspective could prove unfeasible, as despite efforts to establish accessible reading formats, it is likely that judicial and administrative officials will fail to comply. This is because, as mentioned by Diego López, we continue to commit eleven deadly sins that hinder the understanding of legal texts. 😅
The proper use of technology, Legal Design, and education are key tools to address this challenge and turn these deadly sins into applicable principles. It is not necessary to turn this initiative into law to generate a significant impact in the legal sphere.
Today, we delve into the third sin: poor punctuation, which confuses the reader. In previous sins, we mentioned how long sentences and short paragraphs disconnect and disorient the reader. The root of these problems lies in poor punctuation!
According to Diego López Medina, in his analysis of Colombian legal texts, he found that:
1)Lawyers use almost twice as many commas and semicolons (;) compared to periods (.).
That is, the use of periods to provide clarity to the text is forgotten, and an excess of commas is used in an attempt to guide the reader or correct the text, but in reality, it achieves the opposite effect! 😬
2)Grammatically incorrect commas: we separate the subject from the verb of the sentence with a comma. This mistake breaks the relationship between subject, verb, and complement, generating reading comprehension problems. 🤔
3)Use of capital letters after colons (:). The general rule indicates that lowercase should be used after colons (:).
To transform these errors into principles, we propose seeking to connect and guide the reader through correct punctuation. To do this, we invite you to write simple sentences, separated by periods, and avoid overusing commas (,).
The period is a liberating element in the text that helps connect ideas between sentences. This way, the paragraph is structured with the necessary syllogisms to argue.
📝🤓 In collaboration with WOW Legal Experience, we have integrated these principles to develop empathetic and creative solutions to the challenges faced by the legal and judicial context. We are proud to offer our support to improve legal writing and promote clarity in legal communication! 👩⚖️👨⚖️
La versión en español puede encontrarse aquí:
#LegalWriting #ConnectandWrite #EasyReading #WOWLEGAL #TaxLitigation #LegalDesign #LegalWriting 🌐✒️👏
