William Mitchell Law Review Style Sheet for Writers

William Mitchell Law Review uses the Chicago Manual of Style (“CMS”) as its official style manual. The CMS is a comprehensive guide for writers, editors, and publishers. As a style manual for writers, the CMS is the authority for issues of punctuation, grammar, spelling, and word usage. In matters specifically related to legal quotation and citation, The Bluebook is the authoritative reference. This style sheet highlights some key rules of style frequently referenced by writers of law review articles.

“Grammar is a tricky, inconsistent thing. [T]here are aspects of grammar that make good, logical sense, and others that do not.” John Simon

Punctuation (CMS Ch. 6)

Commas

• Always use the serial comma between the last two items in a list of three or more joined by a conjunction. (CMS §§ 6.19, 6.33).
  Example: Red, green, and blue.

• Adverbial, prepositional, or participial phrases are typically set off with an introductory comma. (CMS § 6.25).

Example: In the interim, the law stands.

• When independent clauses are joined by a conjunction (and, but, or), a comma usually precedes the conjunction. (CMS § 6.32).

Periods

• Periods are almost always placed within quotation marks, even within single quotation marks that set off special terms at the end of a sentence. (CMS § 6.8).

Semicolons

• Semicolons should set off elements of a list that are complex, long, or involve internal punctuation. (CMS §§ 6.20, 6.60).

Colons

• Colons should always be placed outside quotation marks.

Quotations

• The Bluebook, Rule 5 dictates how an author should use quotations in a law review article. Specifically:
• Quotations of fifty words or more should be indented from both the left and right margins to set the quoted matter in a block. (Rule 5.1(a)).
• If the block quote appears in a law review footnote, the citation should appear flush with the margin, not indented with the block text.
• Brackets are used to denote alterations such as substituted or explanatory words, or

• Periods and commas precede closing quotation marks. (CMS § 6.8).

• Colons, semicolons, question marks, and exclamation marks follow closing quotation marks unless the question mark or exclamation mark is part of the quoted material. (CMS § 6.9).

Grammar

Generally

• Avoid using the passive voice. (CMS §5.112). The passive voice is formed by combining the conjugated form of the verb to be with the past participle.

Example: Active: The judge decided the case.

Passive: The case was decided by the judge

• Postponing the actor, transforming the object into the subject, and adding wordiness through a prepositional phrase weaken writing in the passive voice.
  Tip: Microsoft Word users can use a “formal” writing style in their grammar check to highlight uses of the passive voice.

Subject verb agreement

• Singular subjects need singular verbs; plural subjects need plural verbs. But the indefinite pronouns make things interesting.

See, e.g., http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/sv_agr.htm for examples.

Use of personal pronouns

• Pronouns are words “that are used as substitutes for nouns or noun phrases and whose referents are named or understood in the context.” (Merriam-Webster online dictionary: http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary? book=Dictionary &va=pronoun&x=19&y=15)
• A personal pronoun shows by its form whether it is referring to the speaker, the person or thing spoken to or the person or thing spoken of. (CMS § 5.45). Personal pronouns are useful because words do not need to be repeated.

Use of reflexive pronouns

• There is a tendency to use the reflexive pronoun myself when not appropriate or necessary (http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/pronouns1.htm).

Example: George and I are responsible for this state of affairs.

Not: George and myself are responsible for this state of affairs.

Pronoun reference

• Pronouns usually refer to other words, termed antecedents, which have come before the pronoun. It is imperative to assure that the antecedent reference is clear. (CMS 5.59-5.60).

Example: Officer Schwartz, who arrested Helen Dean, said that Dean was drunk at the time.

Not: Officer Schwartz, who arrested Helen Dean, said that she was drunk at the time.

Gender neutral pronoun 5.204, 5.48-5.49, 5.51

· Gender-neutral wording is a preference, not a requirement. Legal pronouns were traditionally masculine when the gender was unspecified. In the last couple of decades, gender-neutral wording has been embraced in legal writing.

· Using he, his or him as common-sex pronouns is widely considered sexist. It is often possible to rewrite a sentence without the need for a personal pronoun. (CMS § 5.43).

Example: Lawyers always bill their clients.

Instead of: A lawyer always bills his clients.

Use of Subjunctive Mood

• Verb moods are the indicative, imperative and subjunctive. The indicative mood is used for factual statement. The imperative mood is used for commands. The subjunctive mood expresses a condition which is doubtful or not factual. The subjunctive mood “is most often found in a clause beginning with the word if. It is also found in clauses following a verb that expresses a doubt, a wish, regret, request, demand, or proposal.” (http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000031.htm

Example: Indicative The House and Senate agree on the budget.

Subjunctive If the House and Senate were to agree on the budget…

Split infinitives

• Hardliners never believe it is allowable to split an infinitive. Others grammarians accept that verb phrases can be interrupted by a single word without disrupting the sentence. There is little consensus, but splitting an infinitive is allowable if it does not alter the intended meaning of the sentence. (CMS §§ 5.105-5.107, 5.160)

Example: To boldly go where no man has gone before.

Word Usage

That or which?

• “That is the defining, or restrictive pronoun, which the nondefining, or nonrestrictive.” (Strunk, p. 59). The CMS elaborates, “that is used restrictively to narrow a category or identify a particular item being talked about; which is used non-restrictively—not to narrow a class or identify a particular item but to add something about an item already identified.” (CMS § 5.202). When using which in these instances, it is preceded by a comma.

Who or which?

• “To refer to a person either who or which can be used but they are not interchangeable. Who is universal; which is usually selective or limited.” (CMS §5.57).

Avoid jargon

• Adjective to verb transitions are not acceptable in formal prose. (CMS § 5.95). Noun to verb transitions occur more frequently but “recently transformed words should be used cautiously if at all.” (CMS § 5.32).

Avoid bias

• Biased language that is either sexist or consciously or unconsciously prejudicial distracts and may offend readers (CMS § 5.203)

Spelling

Dictionary

• A good dictionary as a reference is essential. Merriam-Webster offers a dictionary and thesaurus online. (http://www.m-w.com/home.htm).

Directionals

• Directionals such as toward, upward, forward, and backward are written without an added s.

Names

• CMS follows Merriam-Webster’s Biographical Dictionary or the biographical section of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. (CMS § 8.1).

Possessives

• The possessive of most singular nouns is formed by adding an apostrophe and an s, while for plural nouns only an apostrophe is added. (CMS § 7.18).

Example: Singular: Kansas’s legislature; Yahoo!’s chief executive

Plural: lawyers’ dues

Plurals

• A good dictionary is essential for checking the plural forms of nouns. (CMS §§ 5.14-5.21; 7.6-7.16).

Foreign Words

• Italics are used for short words or phrases in a foreign language if they are probably unfamiliar to readers.

Example: Mozart’s Così fan tutte is still popular.

Hyphenation

• The dictionary is the starting point for determining if compound terms should be hyphenated, spelled as two words or spelled as a single word. (CMS §7.82)
• General rules for hyphenation of compound words and specific examples are provided in the hyphenation guide of the CMS. (CMS § 7.90)

References

Books

The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (Columbia Law Review Ass’n et al. eds. 17th ed. 2000).

William C. Burton, Burton’s Legal Thesaurus (3d ed. 1993).

The Chicago Manual of Style (15th ed. 2003).

Bryan A. Garner, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage (2d ed. 2001).

Bryan A. Garner, The Elements of Legal Style (2d ed. 2002).

The Little, Brown Handbook (H. Ramsey Fowler & Jane Aaron eds., 9th ed. 2003).

Merrian-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed. 2003).

Deborah A. Schmedemann & Christina Kunz, Synthesis: Legal Reading, Reasoning, and Writing, Appendix II, Paragraph Design, Sentence Structure, and Word Usage (2d ed. 2003).

William Strunk, Jr. & E. B. White, The Elements of Style (3d ed. 1979).

Internet Resources

http://www.junketstudies.com/rulesofw/ - 11 Rules of Writing – Very basic site with straightforward content in a simple interface.

http://www.bartleby.com - Bartleby.com – Access to a dozens of references books online without charge.

http://www.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/ - Guide to Grammar and Writing – Breaks down the help into sentence, paragraph, and essay levels. Includes grammar quizzes and polls.

http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/catalogue.html#gram - Online grammar and writing reference site for composition students.

http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/ - Online grammar site with nice list of reference materials for the general writer.

http://www.lawprose.org - Prolific legal writing author Bryan Garner’s web site. Visitors can sign up to receive a daily word usage tip via email.