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APPELLATE ADVOCACY BLOG

Editor: Tessa L. Dysart
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Saturday, November 10, 2018

GRAMMAR BOTS CAN HELP FIX YOUR LEGAL WRITING

By Joseph Regalia

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"To be a good legal writer, honestly, is to know the law, and to be a good
writer." -- Justice Elena Kagan

Improving your writing muscle is like improving any muscle: it takes a long time
and a lot of effort. Because even after you learn a new writing tool--say, by
reading an article or listening to a lecture--it takes extra work for that tool
to become part of your everyday writing habit. And if it's not habit, good
luck remembering it at 3 a.m. as you pound out a brief.

For law students and young lawyers, a big struggle is simply not having enough
writing tools committed to habit yet. And playing catch-up is tough. They are
still trying to figure out how the law works, much less the nuances of writing
craft. For those of us who begin our legal careers with some big grammar and
style gaps--that just compounds the problem.

As a legal writing teacher, this is an eternal struggle. I sympathize with my
students who feel attacked on all sides: not only must they learn how to wrangle
all these legal concepts, but now they're expected to be a top-notch writer,
too. And I'm not sure which is more difficult. For foreign lawyers, simply
writing grammatically can feel overwhelming.

But fear not, because like so many other things, technology can help. There are
now incredible programs that can do wonders for helping you catch problems in
your writing--and learn new writing tools while you're at it. What these
programs do best is flag style bumps, which not only helps proof your document,
but helps you get better at spotting the problems yourself. I find myself using
these programs more and more to help students plug their grammar gaps and ease
the burden of having to be both advocate and editor.

In this post and next week's, I'm going to walk you through some of the most
exciting automated grammar and style tools out there. In each post we'll look at
a few tools that will help with your editing; then a few that will help you
learn some new writing moves for yourself.

1. To help you spot more edits: ProWritingAid, Word Rake, White Smoke, and
Grammarly

Every month there seems to be a new editing tool on the market. I try to demo
each one as I find them--and there are some big differences in their
capabilities.

ProWritingAid: The powerhouse of style

For me, this might be the most exciting program because of how many editing
tools it has under the hood. PWA gives you more editing suggestions than
Grammarly. And it offers new, exciting ways to see your writing mechanics. I
love having my law students use this tool when they're learning about sentence
length and structure.

On style, PWA catches things that many other checkers don't--like
repetitiveness. We all sometimes repeat a unique word too soon in our writing,
which sounds off to the ear. PWA understands that and will flag them. You can
see that PWA even color-codes the repeats.

PWA also helps shore up all sorts of other style tools: like missing
transitions, pronoun problems, cliches, vague wording, sentence-length
variation, over-dependence on adverbs, passive voice, and over-complicated
sentence constructions (In other words, a good chunk of the things we all
painstakingly edit for).

It has one of the coolest style-analysis tools that I've ever seen. PWA gives
you a visual snapshot of your sentence lengths throughout your document, helping
you home in on the important places to start editing. For law students and young
lawyers, I find that looking at visual and data-driven analysis of their writing
gives them a whole new perspective.

PWA also breaks down all sorts of writing dimensions: like your most commonly
used words, your transition-word index--and so much more. Here is an analysis of
a law review article:

PWA has a powerful grammar and spelling checker that catches contextual
misspellings and usage problems (which, to be fair, many of the other tools on
this list do, too).

PWA offers an awesome word finder that that will help you find that perfect
concrete verb or descriptor you need to persuade. This tool is advanced:
predicting which words or phrases will be most helpful for you given the context
added by surrounding words. PWA can even help you find the perfect sounding
words (if you're going for a rhetorical flourish).

Finally, PWA is pretty good in the learning department, too. It's not designed
as a pure education tool, but it offers great explanations of the edits that it
suggests.

Oh, and PWA integrates with Word and other platforms. So no worries there.

Word Rake: The concise-inator.

I warn you: for legal writing nerds, this one may blow your mind (and feel a
little like magic). Word Rake was built for one thing: conciseness. Click a
button and the tool ripples through your writing, clearing away clutter and glue
words to leave only those content-packed gems.

The founders have 9 patents on their clutter-clearing inventions. And the power
of the technology shows.

A Grammarly alternative: White Smoke

White Smoke is less polished than Grammarly, but it boasts some features that
the grammar-giant doesn't. White Smoke will catch tons of grammar problems that
you would otherwise need to do by hand--like double negatives, subject-verb
disagreement, tense shifts, and those pesky dangling modifers.

The ever-popular (and rightly so) Grammarly.

There is a reason that Grammarly is the most popular editing tool on the market:
it's good. Grammarly operates smoothly and catches many of the important edits.
It's easy to use and fast. And the company is always adding new tools. Grammarly
is also pretty good in the teaching department, explaining most of the edits
that it suggests.

Grammarly has an updated reports feature, which gives you analysis of your
writing style. This is helpful for setting writing goals and tracking your
improvement.

2. To teach you some new writing moves: Noredink, Hemingway App, and Writing
Like a Lawyer

One of the most common questions I get is: how do I work on my basic grammar? A
lot of us have grammar gaps coming into the law, and there is nothing that kills
credibility faster than glaring grammar mistakes in your legal writing. Luckily
there are some great programs for the basics. I'll cover the non-legal ones this
week and explore the legal ones (Core Grammar, Writing Like a Lawyer, and
others) next week.

Noredink: Grammar basics

Noredink is excellent for brushing up on every aspect of grammar and usage. Not
only is it a comprehensive resource for grammar lessons--the developers created
some neat, intuitive ways to practice.

Noredink is great for teachers, because you can setup your own custimizable
course--focusing students on whichever grammar or usage issues you see them
running into. I use it with my foreign law students all the time.

Hemingway app: a high-level writing highlighter

Hemingway app is a classic (and free). This tool will train you to spot long
sentences, complex phrases, over-used adverbs, and passive voice. It's the
easiest tool to use: just paste in your writing and it goes to work. Color-coded
highlights will instantly show you what to work on.

See you next week!

Joe Regalia is a law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, William
S. Boyd School of Law and regularly leads workshops training legal writing and
technology. The views he expresses here are solely his own and not intended to
be legal advice. Check out his other articles and writing tips here.

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/appellate_advocacy/2018/11/grammar-bots-can-help-you-step-up-your-legal-writing.html

| Permalink

COMMENTS

mr. Regalia, could you assess the tools you reviewed from a blind lawyers or
blind law students perspective please. As a completely blind lawyer, I'd
appreciate knowing how these tools interact with screen reading software.
Thanks.

Posted by: Matt | Nov 15, 2018 9:33:29 AM

Hi Matt--let me look into this. You raise a great, and important, question. I'm
not sure how friendly these are to screen readers. I will look into this!

Posted by: Joe Regalia | Nov 15, 2018 10:00:47 AM

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