Sentence, Paragraph, Argument, Brief: Meeting the Four Challenges of Legal Writing

Sentence, Paragraph, Argument, Brief is a fresh, comprehensive, and above all practical guide to writing briefs, informed by decades of working and teaching at one of the nation’s foremost law firms. The book organizes itself around a single theme: good briefs reflect careful attention to the sequence of words, sentences, paragraphs, and arguments. The book explains how to arrange these building blocks of legal prose, throughout illustrating its guidance with before-and-after examples drawn from filed briefs. Unlike other books on this topic, this book gives as many turnkey tips for organizing arguments and briefs as for drafting sentences and paragraphs. It focuses distinctively on the real-world writing challenges, large and small, that litigators face every day.

The book’s original - but practice-tested - treatment of its subject addresses topics other legal writing texts largely ignore. These include how to:

Reposition words in a sentence to enhance its persuasiveness Classify paragraphs to help organize arguments Enhance paragraph flow and coherence Improve professional diction to bolster credibility Group related contentions together to make arguments more coherent Control the tone of background statements to advance a client’s position Refine and coordinate argument headings to help ease judges into arguments Structure tables of contents to transparently reveal a brief’s logic Edit others’ drafts efficiently and without workplace friction, and Improve writing on your own