Gaining control over your contract verb structures requires that you be familiar with “throat-clearing.” What’s throat-clearing? It’s when a drafter sticks a redundant verb structure at the beginning of a sentence. As my gift to you, here’s part of the MSCD section on throat-clearing. The reason for this post is that recently I realized you can have throat-clearing that uses … Read More
You can state numbers as numbers: We ate 25 pizzas! Or you can make numbers do specialized work by grafting on to them a symbol (or, if you insist, a word) so you can state an amount of money: The pizzas cost us $536! Or to the same effect, you can state a percentage: Laquana ate 45% more pizza than … Read More
Somehow, I now find myself articulating for the first time concepts I’ve relied on since forever. Today’s concept is “semantics hygiene”. That’s my term for getting in the habit of expressing yourself clearly in contracts, even if in a given context little or nothing is at stake. The term “semantics hygiene” is brand new. I first used it a couple … Read More
I’ve been presented with a choice between three alternative versions of a boilerplate provision. They’re shown in the image above. Using my categories-of-contract-language lingo, the first version uses language of obligation to express a condition. The second expresses a condition by using a conditional clause; because it uses the subordinator “if”, it focuses on the positive. It includes “only”—without it, … Read More
You cannot be an informed consumer (or producer) of contract language without consulting A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. (See this 2024 blog post.) So doesn’t it follow that to be an informed consumer of contract language, all that’s required is that you get yourself of copy of MSCD? Well, no. For one thing, you have to apply yourself. Contracts … Read More
Apparently Emily Dickinson said, somewhere, “If you take care of the small things, the big things take care of themselves.” That sounds comforting, but it seems like a recipe for unexpectedly being steamrollered while you’re taking care of the small things. Here’s a more reliable but downbeat alternative, said by me, right here: “If you mess up the small things, … Read More
The Notion of “Tested” Contract Language LinkedIn is the place where dead ideas go to be endlessly reborn from their ashes, like a phoenix. One such idea is the notion that it’s risky to abandon the legalese featured in contracts, because courts have told us what those words and phrases mean. My first blog post about this notion of “tested” … Read More
A few days ago, I received an email from the Library of Congress. Here’s the opening sentence: “The United States Library of Congress has selected your website for inclusion in the Legal Blawgs Web Archive, which is part of a larger collection of historically and culturally significant websites that have been designated for preservation.” (The image at the bottom of … Read More
The relentless Kevin Toll (see this blog post) has proposed that I ditch thereafter. Here are some of his proposed changes to Adams Contracts templates: Regarding afterward, Garner’s Modern English Usage 37 (5th ed. 2022) says, “Afterwards (= later) is often changed to afterward by American editors, though in popular usage the two forms are used interchangeably. Across World Englishes, … Read More
At the beginning of this year, I said in this blog post that you cannot be an informed consumer (or producer) of contract language without consulting A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. No one has suggested I’m mistaken. I’m not surprised—disagreeing with me would require that you either (1) mount a spirited defense of copy-and-pasting dysfunction or (2) point … Read More
