Comma placement can cause a big effect in legal documents. (See "What Broadway's Hamilton Teaches About Legal Interpretation.") In ...
Theda C. Snyder - November 9, 2016Comma placement matters. Broadway musical Hamilton’s Angelica Schuyler sings in “Take a Break”: In a letter I received from you two weeks ago I noticed a comma in the middle of a phrase It changed the meaning. Did you intend this? One ...
Theda C. Snyder - October 11, 2016You have content on your website, your practice and bio pages, LinkedIn updates and posts, and, if you have one, a blog and client newsletter. That’s a lot of content, and it needs to be relevant and refreshed.
Susan Kostal - October 3, 2016“I over-exaggerated.” It was impossible to miss the world’s derision for Ryan Lochte’s poor word choice. The Olympian was trying to explain his lies about how he found himself at the wrong end of a gun after a night of partying in ...
Theda C. Snyder - September 15, 2016Perhaps the most ridiculous construct I see and hear regularly is the conditional introductory phrase that prefaces content in documents with, “If you are reading this,” or that starts voicemail greetings with, “If you are hearing this message.”
Theda C. Snyder - August 18, 2016An infinitive is the barest form of a verb. Usually, we refer to a verb form as an infinitive when we use “to”: to go, to run, to think. If you studied a foreign language, you probably learned the infinitive form of verbs and then how to ...
Theda C. Snyder - June 30, 2016Recently I read an article on content marketing that promised to tell, in so many words, “how to market yourself without extra work.” It then presented an app, showing "how easy it is to automate repurposing your content.” “Once you have your ...
Susan Kostal - April 26, 2016
Lawyers writing books is certainly no grand innovation on the marketing front. If you can write a legal brief, you can write a book. But why should you? There are a number of reasons: 1. Authority. A book on a subject you practice daily with ...
Allen Taylor - January 19, 2016
Of all the unexpected gifts from our respective law schools (debt, alcoholism), one of the worst may be a ghastly writing style that appeals only to law school professors and some judges. Don’t get me wrong. Law school provided its fair share of ...
Austen Lott - November 19, 2015
Writing and editing marketing copy — for a brochure, proposal, website, whatever — can be a high-wire act. If there's more than one lawyer in your practice, you know it's true: Make editing a group event, and it becomes a management nightmare. ...
Susan Kostal - November 12, 2015
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