Ken Adams is the author of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. It’s the only authoritative guide to the building blocks of contract language, and it’s in widespread use throughout the legal profession. The first edition was published by the American Bar Association in 2004; the fourth edition was published in 2017.
You can buy print and ebook versions of the fourth edition from this page of the ABA Web Store. (If you want it sent to Canada, see this blog post; for information about how to use the ebook, see this blog post.) You can read the ABA ebook on a Kindle; see this post.
You can buy the print version at Amazon, here. Historically, Amazon has offered the book at a discount, but the price tends to fluctuate. The Kindle and iBooks versions are no longer available.
Here are the table of contents, foreword, preface, introduction, and index to the fourth edition. And here’s an extract of the back-cover text of the fourth edition:
With A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting, Kenneth A. Adams has created a uniquely in-depth survey of the building blocks of contract language. First published in 2004, it offers those who draft, review, negotiate, or interpret contracts an alternative to the dysfunction of traditional contract language and the inertia and flawed conventional wisdom that perpetuate it. This manual has become a vital resource throughout the legal profession, in the United States and internationally.
This is the fourth edition of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. It contains almost one hundred pages of new materials addressing many topics, making it even more authoritative and essential.
This manual’s focus remains how to express contract terms in prose that is free of the archaisms, redundancies, ambiguities, and other problems that afflict traditional contract language. With exceptional analysis and an unmatched level of practical detail, Mr. Adams highlights common sources of confusion and recommends clearer and more concise alternatives. This manual is organized to facilitate easy reference, and it illustrates its analysis with numerous examples. Consult it to save time in drafting and negotiation and to reduce the risk of dispute.
See reviews of the fourth edition by the Law Society Gazette, Casey Flaherty, John Gillies, Jason Steed, and Charles Drayson. Go here for this August 2020 Business Law Today account of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting after 16 years.
If you’re familiar with the third edition, you might find of interest the table of contents of the fourth edition, marked to show changes from the third edition (here).
Go here to listen to a 2013 American Bar Association podcast of a 37-minute conversation with Ken Adams about the third edition of the book. See reviews of the third edition by Mark Anderson, Brian Rogers, Dan Harris, Professor Daniel D. Barnhizer, Dean Irma S. Russell, Daniel Schwartz, Luis Villa, and Matthias M. Edrich.