Practicing Legal Writing with Twitter

As part of my campaign to develop an online presence (which prompted me to start this blog), I started using Twitter. About a month after deciding to attend what is akin to an online cocktail party, and a whopping 4 tweets later, I find that tweeting presents a challenge beyond the mental hurdle of injecting myself into a indefinitely memorialized public conversation. And it is a challenge that can actually help me become a better legal writer. Tweeting requires a user to fit an idea into 140 characters. That takes exercising some fundamental legal writing principles: precision, concision, and clarity. The fact that it is a public forum raises the stakes for mastering these principles.

It is a struggle to get my tweets within the 140 character limit without losing meaning. Reducing the tweet to 140 characters is a concentrated micro-editing exercise that examines each word, space, and punctuation mark, their relation to each other, and asks if the individual parts come together to form a whole that accurately captures the idea. Twitter forces the writer to eliminate gratuitous phrases, choose the best words, and write using language that is accessible to a wide audience. This writing and editing process parallels that to which any legal writing should be subjected.

Consider this tweet of mine: “If your brief is basically a string of block quotes, it lacks legal analysis of the facts & clarity of argument. Edit it. #LegalWriting #Law.” At one point, the tweet was something along the lines of “If you write a brief and it is almost all block quotes, it is a sign that it lacks legal analysis of the facts & clarity of argument.” Twitter’s character limits challenged me to critically examine this tweet; the ultimate result was not only shorter, but captured my idea more accurately. The tweet was a response to a pet peeve of mine that I encounter frequently enough as a law clerk who reads a lot of briefs: pages of block quotes interspersed with an original sentence or two per page. When I come across these briefs, without even reading them, I know they will likely lack legal analysis and understanding the writers’ points might be difficult. For brief writers, it should be a sign of the same and a cue to edit.

In writing the tweet, I knew that I wanted to include the hashtags #LegalWriting and #Law. Hashtags help other users find your tweets when searching. That cost 18 characters; 122 remained. I included the advice to edit the brief, which articulates the conclusion that is left to the reader in the draft tweet. I also replaced “almost all block quotes” with “string of block quotes” which is slightly shorter and, more importantly, elicits a stronger visual image which better cues someone editing a brief to the potential problem to which I was referring.  Lastly, the final tweet more concisely identifies the brief and its writer by replacing “you write a brief” with “your brief.” This helps save on characters and makes for a smoother read without losing meaning.

While we all have some leeway on Twitter to use acronyms and short form, tweeting is an opportunity to practice the qualities of good legal writing. Those tools we employ to write and edit our tweets can and should be adapted for use in legal writing.