When Reda Taleb (McLean Class, 2015) talks about “giving back,” she isn’t just reciting a slogan — she’s living by example. The daughter of immigrants from Bint Jbeil, Lebanon, Taleb’s parents, along with her six older siblings, laid roots in Dearborn’s south end, an area known for its pollution-emitting factory smoke stacks and community of Arab Americans seeking the “American Dream.”
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For a little more than a decade beginning in the late 1980s, on the morning of graduation, the Cooley Law School graduating seniors and the faculty engaged in a game of basketball.
EGRESS? You are in a crowded restaurant. The fire alarm goes off and diners rush for the doors. One door is marked EGRESS and one is marked EXIT. Which one leads to safety? Answer: both. But head for the Egress. It could have life-or-death consequences. Here’s why. Most of the diners likely do not know the word egress. The Plain English Lexicon says of egress that only 2/3 of Americans who completed grade 16 (four years of college) are likely to understand its meaning. It’s a college-grad word. Yet according to the Literacy Project Foundation, the average American reads at a junior-high grade level. This level of literacy might well result in a backup of diners trying to get through the Exit door and clear sailing at the Egress door.
Strunk & White’s classic guide to good writing, The Elements of Style, urges writers to use definite, specific, and concrete language. “Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract.” The goal is to write “with such accuracy and vigor that the reader, in imagination, can project himself into the scene.”
Readability should be a goal of all careful writers. Lawyers, in particular, need to exercise care that their writings are comprehensible to the intended audience.
What does the word “scribes” call to mind? For most people, it evokes the image of medieval monks copying manuscripts with quill pens. But modernly it also refers to a society of legal writers.
Whether it's Halloween or not, verbs and nouns can sometimes be downright scary! Professor Otto Stockmeyer has gone emeritus after more than three decades teaching at Cooley Law School, with visiting stints at Mercer University and California Western. He is a past president of Scribes—The American Society of Legal Writers. A version of this blog post first appeared in the Society’s newsletter The Scrivener.
Last year at about this time, I wrote this in a blog post, “Corporate Annual Reports – Plain-English’s Last Frontier?”
My colleague Joe Kimble has attempted to refute the common superstition against beginning a sentence with the word "but."
One thing is for sure. Only writing professionals and the grammar elite have the passion to wrap their heads around a single word and articulate, with authority, how that one word has evolved. Writing experts Cooley Professor Brad Charles and Thomas Myers, editor-in-chief of The Clarity Journal explore the genesis of the word they in the June 2019 issue of Michigan Bar Journal. Below are excerpts. Click here for the full article with citations. Posted with permission from the June 2019 issue of the Michigan Bar Journal.
