English Grammar and Usage

Behold the power of the internet: why hire an expert when a tool like this is available online?

Susan Moon explains why you shouldn't sweat the small stuff when you're in-house counsel.

Here's a Biglaw rejection letter that was so ridden with typos that a tipster felt the need to send it to us.

Here's how one federal judge decided to deal with a lawyer who was a little too verbose in his pleadings...

Campaign finance statutes? Ha! The D.C. Circuit blows off your pesky "plain English" as an illusion.

As lawyers, words are our stock and trade. What is an argument but a collection of ideas, expressed in words, intended to persuade?

How much English do you have to be able to speak in order to hold elected office? I don’t know, but apparently justices in Arizona think they know it when they hear it. Continuing Arizona’s quest to become the most racist state in the Union, the Arizona Supreme Court affirmed a ruling that prevented Alejandrina […]

Prosecutable hate speech in 17th-century Massachusetts included calling people “dogs,” “rogues” and even “queens” (though the last referred to prostitution); magistrates took serious umbrage at being labeled “poopes” (“dolts”). — John McWhorter, the noted linguist, in his New York Times review this past weekend of Speaking American: A History of English in the United States. […]

Welcome to the latest edition of Above the Law’s Grammer Pole of the Weak, a column where we turn questions of legal writing and English grammar and usage over to our readers for discussion and debate. Last week, we learned that 59% of our readers would never use “their” in the place of “his or […]

Welcome to the latest edition of Above the Law’s Grammer Pole of the Weak, a column where we turn questions of legal writing and English grammar and usage over to our readers for discussion and debate. Last week, we found out that our readers, 81% of them, in fact, couldn’t care less about being polite […]

In Grammer Pole of the Weak, we typically tackle issues of English grammar and usage, as well as questions of style (in terms of legal writing, not fashion). Last week, we delved into the fun topic of em-dash spacing, and learned that our readers are essentially deadlocked on whether to use a space before and […]

In this week's Grammer Pole, we'll be turning to a question of spacing. We've already dealt with sentence spacing -- specifically, whether one space or two should be used between sentences -- but today, we're going to take a look at the em dash. Should you be using a space before and after an em dash?

Welcome to the latest edition of Above the Law’s Grammer Pole of the Weak, a column where we turn questions of legal writing and English grammar and usage over to our readers for discussion and debate. On Friday, thanks to popular demand from our readers, we turned to a contested issue among lawyers. What is the preferred past tense form for the verb plead -- pleaded or pled?

In Grammer Pole of the Weak — yes, “Grammer” is still intentionally misspelled, as are “Pole” and “Weak” — we consider questions of legal writing and English grammar and usage. Last week, for example, we looked at a legal issue, and found out that 81% of our readers voted to support the use of “act […]

Welcome to the latest edition of Above the Law’s Grammer Pole of the Weak, a column where we turn questions of legal writing and English grammar and usage over to our readers for discussion and debate. Last week, we discovered that roughly six percent of our readers use — and will continue using — the […]

Welcome to the latest edition of Above the Law’s Grammer Pole of the Weak, a column where we turn questions of legal writing and English grammar and usage over to our readers for discussion and debate. This week, we turn to a question of grammar. Have you been using the word "irregardless" instead of "regardless"?

As Europeans from the sun-dappled Mediterranean to the icy North Sea brace themselves for doomsday, I thought I’d ignore the wildfire-like turmoil sweeping my continent to write you a sweet little piece about the difference between British and American English. The hook, as we say in the U.K. media, is the Economist’s recent ‘British Americanisation’ […]

Welcome to the latest edition of Above the Law’s Grammer Pole of the Weak, a column where we turn questions of legal writing and English grammar and usage over to our readers for discussion and debate. Last week, we found out that only 29% of our readers lie back and think of England when dealing […]

In last week's Grammer Pole, we called upon you to choose between nationalities instead of Supreme Court justices. When it comes to the placement of punctuation marks in relation to quotation marks, do you favor the British approach or the American approach? Let's review the differences....

Welcome to the latest edition of Above the Law’s Grammer Pole of the Weak, a column where we turn questions of English grammar and usage over to our readers for discussion and debate. Last week, we found out that 52% of our readers thought it was acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition, but […]