Avoiding the twenty most common sentence-level faults in legal writing

The Michigan Bar Journal recently published Bryan Garner’s list of twenty sentence-level faults that often appear in lawyers’ writing. Having just finished grading a stack of student briefs, I can attest that law students tend to make the same errors. Among those I saw too frequently were misplaced and dangling modifiers, comma splices, unclear pronoun antecedents, and inappropriate tense shifts.  Garner’s article includes an example of each error along with a corrected version and a reference to a fuller discussion in Garner’s Modern American Usage.

(jdf)