Speaking your language
Words are the dominant and most powerful tool of the trade for a lawyer. The ability to articulate an argument, draft a pleading or write an advice with precision and clarity are the assay marks of a lawyer.
Virtually everything lawyers do involves the use of language, written and spoken, and we are rightly judged on how well we write and speak. Lawyers should be experts not just in the law but in the use of words and the use of language. (The Scottish term for a solicitor or attorney used to be a 'Writer' (in full, a 'Writer to Her Majesty’s Signet'). Lawyers are, or should be, the wordsmiths of the professions.
This week Liz McAnulty, the SRA’s director of regulation standards, said that she believed a foundation course in English Language should be introduced for all Legal Practice Course students to improve their levels of grammar and general written English (The Lawyer, 29 September).
Worried that even students with straight 'A' grades at A-Level and with a good degree struggle with grammar and spelling in their written work, McAnulty proposes a compulsory module in the English language for all LPC students. And she is correct in her diagnosis of the problem, if not necessarily in her proposed solution.
It might be hoped that graduates embarking on the LPC would already have considerable skill in the use of the written word, that they understand that a lawyer must write exceptionally well and with the utmost precision and clarity - and that if this is not the case, they have chosen the wrong profession - and that their challenge is to make the transition from an academic style and approach to being able to use words without pretension or embellishment to communicate effectively with a client or the court. However, for a surprising number of students, the challenge is not just this transition but a failure to grasp essential rules of grammar, often combined with poor spelling and syntax.
And this is not just a problem with students. A partner at a major City firm confided to me this week that the ability to write English properly is a real concern and that his firm has an increasing number of very well qualified junior lawyers who require remedial English lessons.
Style or fashion
It is fashionable to regard accurate spelling and grammar as inessentials. John Wells, Emeritus Professor of Phonetics at University College London, recently called for a "freeing up” of English spelling and grammar: "text messaging, e-mail and internet chat rooms are showing us the way forward in English”, he suggests.
I am happy to be unfashionable: as Suetonius tells us, even Caesar is not above the grammarians (the Emperor Tiberius was famously rebuked for some verbal slip). Generation Y may be children of an information age of on-line networking, mobile technology and digital communication, but the ability to write is as essential today for a lawyer as it has always been.
At BPP, our LPC students study a legal writing module which begins by reaffirming the principles of spelling, grammar, punctuation, precision, conciseness and even style. We emphasise the importance of understanding your reader and the use of plain English. A surprising number of students however clearly need remedial support; others need to be informed that there is no place for ‘text speak’ in an email to a client.
But is a compulsory foundation course or remedial lessons at Law School the answer? In the long term, written skills need to be addressed at school and, if necessary, at university. I would re-introduce the formal teaching of grammar (all students should be able to parse a sentence). In all written assessments -in whatever subject - at both school and university students should be marked and penalised on spelling, punctuation and grammar.
In the shorter term, LPC students who feel that their English Language skills need improving should seek advice and support from their law school and continue to hone those skills as a trainee and junior lawyer. But what an indictment of our education system that law schools should have to consider the introduction of remedial lessons in the country's own language.
Peter Crisp is dean of BPP law school.
Readers' comments (9)
Anonymous | 2-Oct-2008 5:34 pm
Grammar
I was always taught never to start a sentence with 'And'. Surely Mr Crisp should have been extra prudent when writing an article bemoaning the standards of English, and avoided such an inelegant sentence structure?
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
Bill Shaky | 3-Oct-2008 9:13 am
I think it's journalese
Technically one can't start a sentance with 'and', but clearly in reality you can: newspapers, the Bible and Shakespeare all do it fairly freely.
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
Anonymous | 3-Oct-2008 12:36 pm
Grammar
Not only does Mr Crisp start a sentence (and indeed a paragraph) with the word "And", he begins another paragraph with "But". Practise what you preach, Mr Crisp.
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
Mike | 3-Oct-2008 12:49 pm
'buts' and 'ifs'
Starting sentances with 'buts' and 'ands' is pretty standard 'journalese'. Showing he knows how to adapt to the appropriate style for his audience is an excellent example of Mr Crisp practicing what he preaches.
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
Gerald Erasmus | 3-Oct-2008 1:18 pm
O Peter, thy grammar is appalling.
Yes, even Caesar is not above the grammarians; and nor, it seems, is Mr Crisp. "But is a compulsory foundation course or remedial lessons at Law School the answer?" Mmm. "[C]ompulsory foundation course" and "remedial lessons at Law School" together make two, so I believe the correct form is "are".
Also, I suggest you seek advice and support from your law school in relation to your conciseness and powers of argument: you have managed to waste 700 words on two points, one self-evident (that lawyers need to be able to read and write properly), and one completely unsubstantiated (that many of them cannot). Good day sir.
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
Mike | 3-Oct-2008 1:32 pm
Gerald Erasmus: smug, but wrong
Actually, I think the writer is perfectly correct to use 'is', as to use the word 'are' would be to suggest that BOTH things are the answer, when what he is referring to is that it could be EITHER of them.
The point that lawyers need to speak English is also clearly not self-evident, as otherwise so many straight-A students wouldn't come to law school unable to write properly.
Lastly, the fact that that is happening is far from 'completely unsubstantiated', as the view of the SRA director that first made the point in the previous story, the City law firm partner this piece quotes, and of course Peter Crisp's own direct professional experience all go some way to substantiating.
I did like your 'good day, sir' sign-off, though: it will help remove doubt in the minds of anyone struggling to decide whether you are just a bit unjustifiably smug or actually insufferably so.
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
Jack Curate-Spelling | 3-Oct-2008 3:58 pm
Poor English
There's quite a lot of substantiation in the original story, too.
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
David Willis | 3-Oct-2008 6:37 pm
"Is" or "are" - I'm afraid I agree with Gerald!
I'm afraid I have to agree with Gerald on the "is" or "are" point. In a case like this, where the writer is equating two ideas and therefore using a noun rather than an adjective to play the role of the compliment within the structure of the sentence (e.g. "John is a giant" as opposed to "John is tall"), but the two nouns being equated are different in number, whether the verb is singular or plural will be dictated by the number of the noun which is playing the role of the subject (and is, in this respect, grammatically speaking the entity underlying the "action" in the sentence - the "doer" of the verb). Thus if Mr Crisp had designated "answer" as the subject of the sentence rather than the compliment and written, "Is the answer a compulsory foundation course or remedial lessons at law school?", he would have been correct.
However, instead he designated "answer" as the compliment, and "a compulsory foundation course or remedial lessons at law" as the subject. Now, however one chooses to construct the above phrase, it remains plural in number. Therefore the verb should be plural.
As a subsidiary point, surely, Mike, you would allow that, if Mr Crisp had expressed the sentence as a positive statement rather than a question, it would properly have read, "A compulsory foundation course or remedial lessons are the answer." Therefore why should the number of the verb change if it is rephrased as a question?
I would welcome your thoughts (or those of others), as it is an interesting point of grammar.
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
Salman Iqbal | 19-Jan-2009 12:18 pm
Minding your language
I am not sure that there exists any longer a cast-iron rule against beginning a sentence with “And” or “But.” If there ever has been such a rule, it is not always being obeyed by many contemporary professional users of the English language—not to mention several eminent writers of English in the 19th and 20th centuries. Some correspondents have made a mention of grammarians. Perhaps a quotation from a textbook of grammar, published as long ago as 1893 by the Cambridge University Press, might be of some help. Here it is: “If we consider the ease with which long compound verbs can be formed in modern German, it seems curious that our own Teutonic language should lack the same facility. But such is the case. And as compound terms are increasingly necessary to express the complex ideas of science, we fall back on Greek to supply our needs.” This quotation is from The Elements of English Grammar by Alfred West, M.A., of Trinity College, Cambridge, Fellow of University College, London.
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment