TIP 3 Vary sentence structure.

Even as you follow my advice to write short sentences, beware of one grave risk. If every sentence resembles every other sentence, your prose will grow dull, sound robotic, or convey anger.

We have not met. I am in the NY office. I sit down the hall from Bob. Calling Bob out in front of the entire firm is a poor use of the “reply to all” function. Note the lack of any parentheses in this email. It makes it much easier to read.

Bob and I represent clients, not causes. We like Native Americans. If Native Americans had hired Bob, the Redskins would have lost the case. But they didn’t. They hired someone else. So it was incumbent on Bob to kick their ass in court. It is really that simple.⁹

Most of the time, however, you won’t want to sound so contemptuous. You can easily defend your prose against that risk — and keep readers engrossed — by varying your sentence length and structure and by adding an occasional long sentence amidst the short ones. (And for those of you who want to try the strict twenty-five-word-limit, yes, even a twenty-five-word sentence can seem long and complex if many of your other sentences contain just six to fifteen words.)

Tip 1 emphasized that brevity will help almost any writer; Tip 3 reminds lawyers that variety is just as important as brevity.

Table 2. Twelve Ways to Vary Sentence Structure

You can and should combine the approaches presented in Table 2, and you should also develop others. The above list is merely a starting point in the taxonomy of sentence structure. (I use fairly colloquial descriptions of sentence structure rather than the more formal language of grammarians, which deploys terms like “compound” and “complex” sentences.)

One other key tip about varying your sentences deserves some attention. Many legal writing professors encourage writers to begin each sentence in a paragraph with the same subject to improve comprehensability. But that approach can also make writing sound overly simplistic, as in this real example from a top law firm:

First, Thompson indisputably suffered an injury in fact, having been dismissed from a position as a metallurgical engineer which he had held for seven years. Thompson was unemployed for a year after that dismissal. Thompson and Regalado were married shortly after his termination, and had to live apart for nearly a year when Thompson was forced to move to another city to find comparable employment. Thompson testified that the resulting forced separation from his wife was a “huge hardship for our marriage.” The injury to Thompson was not an incidental and indirect consequence of some economic harm done to Regalado. Precisely to the contrary, it was Thompson himself who suffered the immediate injury caused by the retaliatory dismissal; injuring Thompson was the means by which the employer sought to punish Regalado. “[T]he harm [to Thompson] was the intended consequence of the unlawful practice (albeit an intermediate harm in path to the ultimate goal of harming Regalado)....” Pet.

To prevent Thompsonitis, use pronouns (e.g., “he” instead of “Thompson”), combine sentences, and use a different subject from time to time — often enough to spruce up your prose, but infrequently enough that readers can easily follow the story.

Finally, let me offer one additional comment about my suggestion in Table 2 that you use bullet points to vary the shapes and sounds and structure of your sentences. Some readers get nervous about using bullets, which strike them as too reminiscent of corporate writing.

Get over it. Bullets are used often (and effectively) by a huge number of top advocates. Ross Guberman’s stellar Point Made compiles numerous examples of the nation’s most famous advocates using bullets in the nation’s highest courts.¹⁰ Bullets let you emphasize key information and make it possible to list multiple, similarly designed sentences consecutively without causing your prose to sound rote. Just to illustrate that top lawyers use this technique, an example follows. It comes from a brief filed by a team of Supreme Court specialists who asked the Court to invalidate Indiana’s voter identification law:

According to the State, the factual basis for the voter identification law is the risk Indiana faces from in-person voter identification fraud. Given that, the following uncontested facts bear repeating:

· The State has not identified even a single instance of voter impersonation fraud occurring at the polls in the history of Indiana.

· No Indiana voter has ever been charged with any crime relating to impersonation fraud in in-person voting.

· No evidence of in-person impersonation fraud was presented to the Indiana legislature when it was considering the challenged legislation.

· No such evidence was presented in this litigation.¹¹

So use bullets, but even more importantly, remember the key point of the above Tip: ensure that your sentences don’t all resemble one another.