Judge Kressel's much-blogged-about 'order preparation guidelines'

Minnesota bankruptcy judge Robert J. Kressel was surprised by the stir he created when he distributed his “Order Preparation Guidelines” to local bankruptcy lawyers. Before he knew it, his legal-writing guidesheet was bouncing around the 'Net, inspiring mostly favorable comments from bloggers at the ABA Journal, Law.com, and other lofty berths. The editors of ISBA's Bench and Bar newsletter asked the good judge to let them publish his common-sense guidelines, and he did. More interestingly, they asked him to comment and expand on them, and he did that, too. Read the article here. By the way, nothing illustrates the challenge of legal writing better than these two sentences from the introduction to Judge Kressel's guidelines: "My goal in preparing orders, as it is for all of my legal writing, is to use regular grammatical English as much as possible. A secondary goal is to use actual statutory language as much as possible, rather than changing or paraphrasing it, which runs the risk of changing its meaning." If only more actual statutory language were written in regular grammatical English.