One thing you learn to let go of in law school early on is any affection for quality writing. Lawyers are often bad writers, but law professors really take the cake.

I've recently gotten a copy of Garner's Modern American Usage, which is a work of art. If you like good writing, get this book, because it will have two effects. First, it will improve your writing immediately. Second, it will give you permission to indulge your irritation at those who make absolute claims that prepositions cannot end sentences, that sentence fragments are never acceptable, or that contractions have no place in formal writing.

Garner – who, by the way, is also the editor of Black's Law Dictionary – emphasizes relaxed, clear, simple writing as the ideal. He approves of the practices above (when done appropriately, and in moderation). The innermost circles of Garner's hell are reserved for those who add words, phrases and dependent clauses needlessly, and who use long, formal, pompous or euphemistic terms when simpler words would do.

To Garner, the hallmark of great writers is their ability to make complex ideas simple through language. Conversely, the hallmark of terrible writers is their insistence on encrusting the simplest idea with superfluous words. Of course, this makes life more difficult for readers, but he goes one step further: bad writing conceals the subtleties of the subject matter to the writer, who is then limited in their* observation and analysis of the topic.

Anyways. This was prompted by a letter that arrived from a UCLA professor, whose prose made me dizzy and disoriented.

I am pleased to introduce myself as the Executive Director of the Entertainment and Media Law and Policy Program, a curricular specialization which has become one of the most comprehensive, advanced and innovative programs dedicated to the study of entertainment and media law in the country. The intention of the faculty is that students who fulfill the Program’s requirements will have a solid grounding in the law, custom, theory and policy attendant to the practice of law in the motion picture, television, music and other industries involved in creative and artistic matters....

We have fashioned a required curriculum that includes electives from three tiers of courses in the Law School, a research paper, and the opportunity to choose from a variety of appropriate and approved interdisciplinary courses from outside the Law School. We anticipate expanding the possibilities of practical experience in an internship setting attendant to either an appropriate seminar or course of independent study...

So that all upper-division students will have adequate notice to commence the selection of courses with a view toward completing the Program by graduation, we thought it best to provide the course tier structure as they make decisions with respect to registration for Fall 2006.

* He endorses the use of the third-person plural singular as a means of curing the gender-neutrality problem. Sorry, haters.

25 Jul 06