The BUSKLAW Newsletter

  Having just read  Stephen King's Fairy Tale in time for Halloween, it's appropriate to examine his asides on poor writing included in the book. (BTW, Fairy Tale is a good read with King's typical well-executed character development, plot, and a great finish to the story. But you have like the whole Grimm fairy tale genre before you read his take on it.)  Stephen King doesn't tolerate anything less than crisp prose. When the story's hero, Charlie Reade, tries to read a book about the origins of fantasy and its place in the world matrix ("what a mouthful"), he can only scan it because: It was everything I hated about what I thought of as "hoity-toity" academic writing, full of five-dollar words and tortured syntax. Maybe that's intellectual laziness on my part, but maybe not. Later on, Charlie tries to focus on a particular chapter in the "origins of fantasy" book about the story of Jack and the Beanstalk but is put off by "t...

Some folks may believe that writing well and Christmas have little in common, but I dispelled that notion two years ago in  my post about writing well on Christmas . And I have uncovered additional evidence for this holiday season.  I wasn't looking for that evidence, but it popped up in a sales contract that I was reading. The line was something like, "If any Good is nonconforming...." Wait a second. How can the "Good" be non-conforming? Wouldn't that fall to the province of the "Bad"? Then it hit me: the drafter was using "Good" as the singular of "Goods," a term of art defined in the Uniform Commercial Code ("UCC"), the statute regulating the sale of Goods adopted by almost every State.  But not "Good." The UCC doesn't use that word. The reason is simple. Would you walk into your local dry cleaners and ask "Is my pant ready?" You would likely get a quizzical expression from the clerk who mi...

To continue the title: Paul. As in Sir Paul McCartney . But in 1969, there was a problem: several radio stations broadcast a conspiracy theory: Paul died in a car crash in 1966 . And the remaining Beatles covered it up and replaced the dead Paul with an (apparently equally-talented) imposter. Fans began scouring Beatles songs for evidence of the ruse; they pointed to "The walrus was Paul" line from the song  W hite Onion , concluding that "walrus" was the Greek word for corpse (it isn't). in reality, John Lennon was messing with fans' propensity to find meaning to those lyrics when there was none. In an interview for what later became the Beatles Anthology television documentary , John said:  I threw the line in—"the Walrus was Paul"—just to confuse everybody a bit more. It could have been "The fox terrier is Paul." I mean, it's just a bit of poetry. I was having a laugh because there'd been so much gobbledygook about Pepper—...

Growing up, I was told that lawyers were smart cookies. After all, getting a law degree isn't an easy task. You first go to college  and find a subject that is best suited to how your brain works so that you can maintain a high GPA. In my case, I quickly discovered that I wasn't a good fit for the "hard sciences." So I took a lot of Political Science and English courses, learned how to write fairly well, suffered through the tedious law school aptitude test  on October 20, 1973, graduated with a B.A. degree in 1974 and then went on to law school . There, I endured a legal education infused with the Socratic method ( here's an example ), suffered occasional migraines (because some of my law professors were truly smart but couldn't teach) and graduated with my law degree on Mother's Day, 1977. Passed the Michigan bar exam and by God, became an honest-to-goodness lawyer in November of 1977! So having gone through undergraduate studies, law school, and th...

(Note: you may want to stop here if you aren't a spiritual person in the Judeo-Christian tradition.)   As an introduction to this post, I'll share my religious background. I was brought up in the Protestant tradition with the Dutch Reformed twist. But when friends ask me what I really believe in, I hedge my bets based on: I went to Hope College , affiliated with the Reformed Church in America.  I went to Notre Dame Law School , a respected Catholic institution. I'm a quarter Jewish and was cared for by a fairly authentic Jewish mom (who was thankfully tempered by my 100% Danish father).  So at the pearly gates , I'll show Saint Peter (or whoever) the three Protestant-Catholic-Jew entry tickets reflecting this background, and hopefully one (or more) will allow passage.  So now that I've disclosed my broad-minded belief system, here's my thesis: using plain language furthers the Christian and Jewish faiths.  Contemporary Christian evangeli...

In last month's newsletter, we gave three examples of wordy, unclear, racist, pompous, and dull writing: as an opening sentence to a Bizarro-World version of Stephen King's The Gunslinger , as the beginning of a typical "big law firm"-drafted contract, and bureaucratic (including political) statements. We then compared these monsters of prose to their plain-English versions. But so what? Is poor literary, legal, business, and government writing merely a mote in the eye or something more sinister?  Let's start with bureaucratese . The Trump Administration didn't invent it but surely has taken this dark art to new heights (or depths). And their penchant for typographical errors is a new twist. In this recent  Business Insider article , 84% of 1,043 people surveyed said they would be less likely to trust the government if its communications contained spelling or grammatical mistakes. Specifically addressing Trump's notorious tweets containing such gems ...

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."  Thus begins Stephen King's epic story of the gunslinger, Roland Deschain, and the popular Dark Tower series of novels describing his adventures. But King didn't have to write this sentence that way; he could have consulted with the typical lawyer, politician, or company PR department first. Had he done so, the sentence may have appeared so: "The bad hombre who was dressed mostly in dark clothing and running fast across an arid land was pursued by a multi-armed, extremely dangerous, and notorious vigilante." The difference in these two sentences is clear. King's concise short sentence creates an image that grabs the reader's attention and raises provocative questions. Who is the man in black? Who is the gunslinger? Why is he after the man in black? But the Bizarro World Stephen King sentence - with its ethnic slur, passive voice, ambiguity, suppositions, and supe...

I love pie and plain English about equally, although plain English is less fattening. Pie - especially the caramel toffee apple variety - for Thanksgiving is especially grand because afterward, you can eat leftover pie for breakfast without a lot of guilt. And chances are that the rest of the household won't consider pie a suitable breakfast food, so you're good to go.  Grand Rapids, Michigan, is blessed with an excellent source of pies: Sweetie-licious . Until recently, they had two locations: one in GR's Downtown Market  and the other in beautiful  East Grand Rapids . I grew up in EGR and still fond of the place. So it was very convenient to journey across town to Sweetie's EGR location to pick up a pie for holidays (or when the pie lust grew to be unbearable). Because life isn't fair, Sweetie-licious closed its EGR location several months ago. (But mercifully their Downtown Market location is still going strong.) When I sauntered past their empty EGR sto...

Most of you are business professionals and thus are involved with contracts. Depending on the nature of your enterprise, you have various contracts in force, for example:  >sales agreements >purchase agreements >real estate leases >purchase order terms and conditions >software license and maintenance agreements >service agreements >equipment maintenance agreements >consulting agreements >contractor agreements >employment agreements >non-disclosure agreements >non-compete agreements >transportation or logistics agreements >financial institution agreements Perhaps you work with these documents on a regular basis and are familiar with their content. Or you pay a high-priced law firm to do that for you. More commonly, however, you keep these documents in a file cabinet, rarely review them, and only call your expensive big-firm lawyer when there are problems with the transaction. Whatever the case, consider the ...

“I’m a lawyer. I solve problems you never knew existed with words you don’t understand.” On the internet, you can buy a t-shirt bearing this indictment against lawyers. But is this allegation credible enough to be displayed to the public - or is it cringeworthy? Let’s pull it apart and see where we end up! This is a true story. In the 1980s and 90s, a local real estate agent (call him Steve), owned a series of family restaurants in the small cities surrounding Grand Rapids, Michigan. Each restaurant had a PA system that re-broadcast local radio stations to Steve’s customers. One day, an ASCAP representative visited one of Steve’s restaurants, heard the radio station on the PA, and asked the manager if the establishment had a license to re-broadcast the music. The manager referred the ASCAP representative to Steve, who promptly told the representative to “pound sand.” Steve used his common sense to conclude that if he could listen to radio stations in his car or at home witho...

If you're a fan of the Peter Jackson Hobbit movies, you may recall the intimidating contract that the Dwarves foisted upon poor Bilbo Baggins in the first movie ( The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey ). That contract was full of legal jargon. So my colleague Michael Braem and I decided to write about it for the August, 2015 Michigan Bar Journal's Plain Language column. Here's the link:  http://www.michbar.org/file/barjournal/article/documents/pdf4article2677.pdf . For those of you unfamiliar with the first Hobbit movie, here's a link to a You Tube video showing the Dwarf-drafted contract - and Bilbo's reaction to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2idYEBi51c I'd like to thank Michael for our collaboration and Professor Joe Kimble for thinking out of the box for this Plain Language column. Also, much gratitude goes to the author and designer of the prop contract, New Zealand artist Daniel Reeve, for exchanging numerous emails with the authors about why ...