The importance of words
What matters is that, as a Lawyer, we skill and write with clarity. For everyone’s sake, but especially for our sake, which is finally on who will reap the benefit of speaking clearly and briefly before the judge.
Speak well and write clearly with two paws that help balance the table of justice. Speaking and writing well is not the same as speaking or writing poorly, although sometimes the second is more comfortable. On our expertise will depend, in large part, the condemnation or acquittal for our client. Let’s not allow one or a paragraph that is too long to make it difficult to understand a text. We tend to reason, or not, in exposing our arguments. But what is sure is that the Judge will thank us for being brief and clear.
As Lawyers, our task consists of climbing three peldaños. The first is to know what to say. The second, write it clearly. The third, defend and persuade. But it’s not worth climbing the third peldaño directly from the first. And every now and then, the second foot passes without giving it importance.
Writing clear is a mandate of holy justice. Reading a poorly written text produces the same effect as seeing a lawyer dressed in toga and chanclas. En el ambito judicial there is a code, as in all professions. Nuestra imagen la cremos nosotros mismos. The language we use while speaking and writing is our most visible identity password.
Certainly, in the legal scope there is a circumstance that does not occur in any other profession. Aun living in the 21st siglo, we continue to use forms that maintain expresions from 20 years ago. We wrote very long paragraphs with the narration of the stories, and which we crowned with a I beg that surely chirría. Supplicar means “to ask with rodillas”. Although the preposition culpable de la sumisión is not seen, there it is; well hidden and doing its job. Prepositions are something more than a list of words we learn by heart at school. A misused preposition makes us confuse up and down, before and after, before and after. When someone says that he acts “from” sincerity instead of “with” sincerity, maybe it’s not clear that his actitud is sincere. If one is sincere, it is not necessary for him to say so. And mucho less, that uses a preposition that indicates place in place of manner.
Something similar happens to supplicate justice. Summation is not a required condition in the judicial sphere. We live in a State of Right. La justice se pide por Derecho, no por piedad.
We call each thing by its name. Legal writing has to be clear as daylight. If we do not use the gerunds bien or just use comas, and we confuse the order of the words, there will be a moment when the judge does not understand what the Abogado speaks. How do we want justice to be done if we do not take care of the report on which it is based?
The grammar is not my taste, we know well that we went to the old school of pizarra y tiza. But true grammar is not what we learn in school: endless verbal forms, analysis of absurd sentences that have served no more than to hate syntax. However, the syntax is what supports the language that allows us to understand ourselves. If we don’t write it clearly, we put the task to the test difficult.
I speak in the quality of a lawyer who had to explain to my client a sentence that I received a few days ago. I need to read it five times to understand it. I am sure that this judge belongs to the clan of those who hate grammar. But we have something to do, among all lawyers and judges. It is our obligation to write clearly, so that there is no doubt about what is resolved in a lawsuit. When we have to read a text twice, it’s because the text is badly written. Grammar is not what we learn in boring books with absurd examples. Grammar is clarity, simplicity, brevity. And, above all, balance that is distributed to each person.
Elena Regulez
Lawyer specialist in Family Law and Criminal Law
07/18/2022
