The Lawyer's Guide to Writing Well

Explains the importance of clear, concise legal writing, identifies causes of bad writing, and offers advice on improving one's skills

Reference

Goldstein, Tom

Lieberman, Jethro Koller

Words, Language & Grammar

McGraw=Hill

Criticism of the press has flourished at times over the last one hundred years, especially during the first part of this century. For a 1920 issue of the New Republic, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz wrote a stunning indictment of the New York Times for botching the coverage of the Russian Revolution. The 1980s have been a fallow period for cogent press criticism, but the decade has been characterized by a series of upheavals crying for fuller scrutiny. Janet Cooke, a Washington Post reporter, was forced to return the Pulitzer Prize for a fabricated story about an eight-year-old heroin addict; the National News Council collapsed; a blizzard of libel suits covered newspapers, magazines, and networks; and Gary Hart in his bid for the presidency forced an examination of what should be private or public knowledge. Killing the Messenger is an anthology of some of the most provocative writing that has been done in this century about the press. It is a seminal collection of neglected pieces linked together to offer different perspectives on many of the issues that are plaguing the press today.
 Killing the Messenger examines how the concentration of media ownership denies access to the public, how the media inadequately police themselves, how reporters could be better trained, and how the press sensationalizes on the one hand and censors itself on the other. Tom Goldstein has selected five areas of concentration: reporting on private matters, journalists and their biases, the power and limitations of the press, making better reporters, and the techniques journalists use to portray reality. Some of the selections have been taken from books that have been long out of print, or from official reports. Others come from magazines of speeches. The contributors include Theodore Roosevelt, Joseph Pulitzer, Upton Sinclair, Louis Brandeis, Spiro Agnew, and John Hersey. The editor has provided brief introductions and headnotes to each section.
Tom Goldstein has chosen these articles to encourage contemporary journalists to look at themselves more closely, to apply the same skepticism to themselves that they readily heap on city councilmen, police chiefs, football coaches, movie directors, and heads of state. According to him, journalists have not shown much appetite for self-analysis during a crucial time when they should welcome, not recoil from, criticism of their own performance.

Killing the Messenger: 100 Years of Media Criticism

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Columbia Univ. Pr.

It matters how you write. Lean, clear, crisp prose is no luxury for practitioners who face crowded court calendars, staggering mounds of paper, and overly long affidavits, memoranda, and briefs. Disorganized documents full of "legalese" burden courts and shortchange clients. This concise, lively, and eminently practical volume demystifies legal writing, outlines the causes and consequences of bad writing, and prescribes straightforward, easy-to-apply remedies that will make your writing readable. Everything that most lawyers will need to improve their writing quickly and markedly is here. Authoritative and unique among legal writing guides, the book draws on a nationwide survey conducted by the authors. In their responses, 300 lawyers, judges, professors, writing instructors, and legal journalists from all over the country provided insights into lawyers' writing habits. Throughout The Lawyer's Guide, authors Goldstein and Lieberman illustrate their points with instructive examples taken from these lawyers' daily practices. Complete with a glossary that addresses lawyers' most common errors, this easy-to-use book is an invaluable tool for practicing lawyers and a sensible grounding for law students. It is a definitive guide to becoming a better writer—and a better lawyer.

Lieberman, Jethro K.

Legal Education

University of California Press

The Lawyer's Guide to Writing Well, Second Edition

This eminently practical volume demystifies legal writing, outlines the causes and consequences of bad writing, and prescribes straightforward, easy-to-apply remedies that will make your writing readable. Complete with usage notes that address lawyers' most common errors, this well-organized book is both an invaluable tool for practicing lawyers and a sensible grounding for law students. This much-revised second edition contains a set of editing exercises (and a suggested revision key with explanations) to test your skill. This book is a definitive guide to becoming a better writer—and a better lawyer.

This eminently practical volume demystifies legal writing, outlines the causes and consequences of bad writing, and prescribes straightforward, easy-to-apply remedies that will make your writing readable. Complete with usage notes that address lawyers' most common errors, this well-organized book is both an invaluable tool for practicing lawyers and a sensible grounding for law students. This much-revised second edition contains a set of editing exercises (and a suggested revision key with explanations) to test your skill. This book is a definitive guide to becoming a better writer—and a better lawyer.

In this critically acclaimed book, Tom Goldstein and Jethro K. Lieberman demystify legal writing, outline the causes and consequences of poor writing, and prescribe easy-to-apply remedies to improve it. Reflecting changes in law practice over the past decade, this revised edition includes new sections around communicating digitally, getting to the point, and writing persuasively. It also provides an editing checklist, editing exercises with a suggested revision key, usage notes that address common errors, and reference works to further aid your writing. This straightforward guide is an invaluable tool for practicing lawyers and law students.

Lawyer's Guide to Writing Well

Nice used library book, with mylar over jacket. Excellent look at how bias happens in journalism, not the utter nonsese of the "liberal" press, this is by an actual reporter who shows how lack of ethical consistency and sloppy reporting are actually responsible for the twisting of news by working reporters (at this time there was no Fox News so he missed the really awful modern blog and TV bias)

The News at Any Cost: How Journalists Compromise Their Ethics to Shape the News

Business & Money

Business Culture

Simon&Schuster

A former reporter for AP and "The New York Times" provides an insider's account of how journalists often violate the rules and ethics of their profession to get--or suppress a story and discusses abuses ranging from secret taping to plagiarism

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

The complaint is all too common: I know something about that, and the news got it wrong. Why this should be, and what it says about the relationship between journalism and truth, is exactly the question that is at the core of Tom Goldstein’s very timely book. Other disciplines, Goldstein tells us, have clear protocols for gathering evidence and searching for truth. Journalism, however, has some curious conventions that may actually work against such a goal. Looking at how journalism has changed over time--and with it, notions about accuracy and truth in reporting—Goldstein explores how these long-standing and ultimately untrustworthy conventions developed. He also examines why reliable standards of objectivity and accuracy are critical not just to a free press but to the democratic society it informs and serves. From a historical overview to a reconsideration of a misunderstood book about journalism (The Journalist and the Murderer) to a reflection on the coverage of the war in Iraq, his book offers a remarkably wide-ranging and thought-provoking account of how journalism and truth work—or fail to work—together, and why it matters.

Journalism and Truth: Strange Bedfellows (Medill Visions Of The American Press)

History

Americas

Northwestern University Press

What the Truck: An Apocalypse LitRPG (Battle Trucker)

United States

Podium Publishing

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Books by Goldstein, Tom

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Goldstein, Tom. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Lawyer's Guide to Writing Well

Killing the Messenger: 100 Years of Media Criticism

The Lawyer's Guide to Writing Well

The Lawyer's Guide to Writing Well, Second Edition

The Lawyer's Guide to Writing Well, Second Edition

Lawyer's Guide to Writing Well

The News at Any Cost: How Journalists Compromise Their Ethics to Shape the News

The News at Any Cost: How Journalists Compromise Their Ethics to Shape the News

Journalism and Truth: Strange Bedfellows (Medill Visions Of The American Press)

What the Truck: An Apocalypse LitRPG (Battle Trucker)