Why is legal writing so convoluted?

Legal writing is famously inscrutable and inaccessible — especially fond of long parenthetical ideas shoved in the middle of sentences. And according to a recent study, their reader-unfriendly prose is contagious.

“Legal documents are largely incomprehensible to lawyers and laypeople alike,” write the authors of a study published this summer. In other words, nobody — not even lawyers themselves — can easily slog through their stuff. Yet they keep cranking out sentences like this gem I found online: “I am herewith returning the stipulation to dismiss in the above entitled matter; the same being duly executed by me.”

In my books and columns, I sometimes take badly written passages and show how they could have been better. No can do this time. You can’t streamline a passage if you don’t know what it says. Bravo, returner of the stipulation to dismiss. Bravo.

If non-lawyers can’t decipher stuff like this and even lawyers themselves find it hard to understand, why do they write like this?

To find out, researchers asked 200 study participants to write laws prohibiting crimes like drunk driving and burglary. Then they asked them to write stories about those crimes.

The laws they wrote contained unnecessarily long, labyrinthine sentences with lots of parenthetical explanations crammed in. The stories, however, were written simply, without the parenthetical information stuffing. The kicker: None of the participants were lawyers. They were laypeople who somehow got it in their heads that bloated, fussy sentences make you sound more authoritative.

Researchers explain this with the “magic spell hypothesis” legal writing, which you can read about in my recent column.

Chaise longue and chaise lounge

Chaise longues — those reclining full-length chairs that beckon you to the beach — are making me nostalgic. Not for days when I had more free time and closer proximity to the ocean, but for days when all the editing rules I learned were still relevant. Editing rules like: It’s chaise longue, not chaise lounge.

The nostalgia hit me recently when I read this sentence about digital nomads in the New York Times Magazine: “Then, from a chaise longue on the beach, they can register a business with the tap of a button.”

Outside the New York Times, “longue” sightings are rare these days. More and more, I see “chaise lounge” instead. That’s not necessarily a problem. But when you’re a longtime copy editor who once believed that editing rules were universal and people who knew them were uniquely valuable, it’s hard to let go.

Apparently, some editing bigwig at the New York Times feels the same way. “Chaise longue” appears in their pages about three or four times a month. The only recent instances of “chaise lounge” appear in the proper name of some product that spells it that way.

This can get a little awkward, like in the Times’ 2019 article “Shopping for a Chaise Longue” that lists five chaise longues named “chaise lounge,” sometimes with both spellings appearing in the same sentence. It’s the kind of tug-of-war between old and new that we editors see a lot. “Healthy” and “healthful” are another example. Read about both in my recent column.

'Whomever' is harder for people who good at grammar

 “I’ll hire whomever does best in the interview.” 

“I’ll hire whoever does best in the interview.”

People who aren’t trying to use good grammar, often choose “whoever” in a sentence like this. People who are being careful often choose “whomever.” Ironically, the folks who weren’t trying get this right more often than people who are trying. The correct choice here is “whoever.”

Grammar buffs get this wrong because they have only half the picture. They know that “whom” and “whomever” are object pronouns, but they don’t understand that whole clauses can be objects, too.

Object pronouns are words we use every day and include “me,” “him,” “us” and “them.” They’re often objects of verbs, as in “show me,” “invite him,” “tell us” and “ignore them.” Or they’re objects of prepositions like “at,” “to” and “with”: “yell at me,” “send to him,” “relate to us,” “go with them.”

They’re the mirror image of subject pronouns “I,” “he,” “we,” “they,” etc., which we use as subjects: “I yell,” “he sends” and so on.

“Whom” is an object pronoun, “You sent it to whom?” and “who” is a subject pronoun, “Who sent this?” Similarly, “whomever” is an object pronoun and “whoever” is a subject pronoun. But because these two often sit between clauses, there’s a twist that some people don’t realize.

Compare: “Police will arrest whoever breaks the law” and “Police will arrest whomever they catch breaking the law.”

In both cases, the pronoun comes right after the verb “arrest.” So if you apply a simple understanding of pronouns, you would guess you need “whomever” there because it’s an object. But in that second sentence, the word after “arrest” is not the object. The whole clause that follows “arrest” is the object, and that clause needs its own subject: whoever.

For a super-simple example, look at the sentence: I saw who did it. The object of the verb “saw” is the whole clause “who did it.” If the pronoun were the object, you’d have to say, “I saw whom did it.”

Even professional writers, editors and broadcasters get this wrong. A lot.

Look at this sentence from the Aug. 22 New York Times sports section: “He talks to whomever wants to hear about the story of the hat.”

Either the editor didn’t understand object pronouns or the writer made a mistake and the editor didn’t catch it. He or she clearly thought that the preposition “to” needed to be followed by an object pronoun. But in fact, the object of the preposition “to” is the whole clause “whoever wants to hear about the story of the hat.” That’s because “wants” needs a subject and only “whoever” can fill that role.

Anytime you see a “whomever” sandwiched between two clauses, ask yourself if the second verb has a subject. In “Police will arrest whomever they catch breaking the law,” the subject of the verb “catch” is “they.” Clearly, we don’t need to swap “whomever” to “whoever” to do the catching in the verb. But in “Police will arrest whoever breaks the law,” there’s no other word that could be the subject of “breaks,” so “whoever” must be it. Here's the full story in my recent column.

When a comma and a possessive s collide

A while back, an AP Stylebook online subscriber wrote: “Please, no recasts. I cannot find a definitive answer anywhere on the planet. Keep in mind these represent directly quoted utterances. Do we keep or toss the comma after France’s, New York’s and 2001’s? ‘Alice said, “Paris, France’s, sights are breathtaking!”’ ‘Gov. Cuomo said, “Albany, New York’s, crime rate has risen exponentially.”’ ‘Joe said, “September 11, 2001’s, tragic events will be indelibly etched in the minds of everyone.”’”

These are interesting questions because they create a conflict between comma rules and good taste. Comma rules say that when you refer to a city followed by its state, then continue the sentence, the state is followed by a comma. For instance: Albany, New York, is lovely this time of year.

The same rule applies to countries after cities: Paris, France, is home to the Eiffel Tower.

And the same rule applies to years after dates: September 11, 2001, was a tragic day.

But sometimes, especially in casual speech, people can make New York, France or 2001 possessive. New York’s weather is nice this time of year. France’s president will visit. 2001’s events affected us all.

This is almost never a problem, but when the rules call for a comma in the same spot, things get unsightly and a little weird. Notice how, in “Paris, France’s, sights are breathtaking,” it sounds more like you’re talking about France’s sights than Paris’. A similar effect is true for the other two sentences.

Rulebooks like the Associate Press Stylebook don’t tell you what to do in these situations. So subscribers sometimes just pose the question to AP’s editors on the stylebook’s website. Usually, this works out great. But not this time.

“Really, truly, recasting is the thing to do,” replied an editor.

I don't love this answer. I explain why in my recent column.