📚✨ Discover the 11 Deadly Sins of Legal Writing! 🚨📝

Second sin: constructing short paragraphs disorients the reader.

Author: Andrés Felipe Rivas Cardona in collaboration with Karol Valencia and WOW Legal Experience I Legal Design Agency 🌎

La versión en español de este artículo se puede encontrar aquí: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/descubre-los-11-pecados-capitales-de-la-redacci%C3%B3n-rivas-cardona-bvjlc

The initiative of the Easy Reading Law is extremely powerful for its potential to impact the legal field and those who practice it. However, from a practical standpoint, turning this initiative into law would be unfeasible. It is highly likely that judicial and administrative officials will fail to comply with it, despite efforts to establish easy reading formats. The reason: as Diego López mentions, we continue to commit eleven cardinal sins that hinder reading comprehension of legal texts.

The correct use of technology, Legal Design, and education are key tools to achieve this impact. They are the ones that can truly turn these cardinal sins of legal writing into applicable principles. It is not necessary to turn this initiative into law to impact the legal field and those who practice it. However, while these tools do their job, there may be initiatives in the future that may have the status of law to be binding.

Today I will talk about the second sin: building short paragraphs that disorient the reader.

Communication is key in our profession. Whether litigating, advising clients, or being officials, we express ourselves through writings composed of sentences and paragraphs. In grammar, paragraphs are the heart of the argument. Just as this organ pumps blood to keep the body functioning, the paragraph maintains the vitality of the text. It ensures that the ideas contained in the sentences are presented in a comprehensible and organized manner to the reader. For this reason, in our profession, paragraph structuring is vital to effectively communicate our ideas. This is where the reader is guided logically to understand clearly what we want to communicate. To do this, we must establish the connections between necessary premises and conclusions that allow for guidance.

The following are some challenges we must assume when writing to guide the reader:

Logical order: containing the complete syllogism (Major Premise + Minor Premise = Conclusion);
Paragraphs with structure:

Between five and eight sentences (up to 30 words per sentence. Ideal 20)
Between 130 to 160 words
Build coherent texts. Structure each paragraph to be one of the premises of the syllogism.

A cardinal sin found in Colombian legal texts is that unstructured paragraphs disorient the reader. According to Diego López-Medina, he has found tiny paragraphs of only 80.6 words with very long sentences (from 1 to 2 sentences). That is, they are writings that do not have the premises to convey an idea logically. These paragraphs do not guide, but confuse the reader. Therefore, the lack of structure in our paragraphs has become a problem because unconsciously we build paragraphs that do not argue. Without the necessary syllogisms, we weaken our ideas to the point of confusing the reader. As a consequence, it prevents us from communicating clearly as lawyers.

Being paragraphs the reader’s guide, in building our paragraphs, we must precisely seek that: their orientation. To do this, it is necessary to keep in mind how human thought logic works when arguing in our writings. With this, the reader can make rational connections between premises and conclusions.

Together with WOW LEGAL EXPERIENCE, we have let creativity fly to integrate these principles. Thinking about creating visual experiences that accompany the hierarchy of information to communicate the idea to the reader is possible. When dealing with technical issues, these tools serve to convey ideas more easily without implying that paragraphs are structured logically.

Ask us how we can help your legal teams flow with their writing and develop empathetic and creative solutions to the challenges posed by the legal and judicial context.

#LegalWriting #Connectandwrite #EasyReading #WOWLEGAL #TaxLitigation #LegalDesign #LegalWriting 🌐👩‍⚖️👨‍⚖️