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Reading List
If you want more information on how to write in plain English,
we’ve listed just a few of the many resources available, including those
from the SEC. You may want to visit your local library to review these
books or a broader selection. Goldstein and Lieberman’s book, The
Lawyer’s Guide to Writing Well, includes a comprehensive list of books
about legal writing. We are not endorsing any of these books, but have
included them as a resource for your convenience.
Claire Kehrwald Cook, Line by Line
(Houghton Mifflin, 1985).
Alan J. Davis, Graphs and Doublespeak, Quarterly Review of Doublespeak,
Volume XVIII, Number 4, July 1992.
Bryan A. Garner, The Elements of Legal Style
(Oxford University Press, 1991).
_______, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage
(Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 1995).
Tom Goldstein and Jethro K. Lieberman, The Lawyer’s Guide
to Writing Well
(University of California Press, 1989).
Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The Transitive Vampire: A Handbook
of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed
(Times Books, 1984).
_______, The New Well-Tempered Sentence, A Punctuation Handbook
for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed
(Ticknor & Fields, 1993).
a plain english handbook
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