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Seven Deadly Writing Sins
And How to Avoid Them
Clarity and precision are essential to effective legal writing. Readers expect
appropriate word choice, solid sentence structure, and a logical progression of
paragraphs. Anything less distracts the reader from the content of the work; errors in
grammar, spelling, and punctuation may distort the meaning of the work.
It is each writer's responsibility to review and edit work for common errors in
grammar, spelling, and punctuation. No work submitted to a professor at Touro Law Center,
even as a draft, should contain any of the errors discussed here.
You will be a more effective legal writer if you learn to avoid The Seven Deadly
Writing Sins. The most common of the "Sins" include:
- Agreement problems
- Pronoun/Point of View
Shift
- Ambiguous Pronouns
- Sentence Logic
- Misplaced Modifiers
- Flawed Parallelism
- Verb Problems
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