There is no secret to good appellate brief writing. Which is to say: A brief is no different than any other form of writing. While there are plenty of bad briefs, there are just as many bad poems, novels, ‘zines, catalogs, blog entries, white papers, screenplays and VCR manuals. All of these can be well-written, and many are. Your favorite book is treasured not just for its resonant subject, but for the prose style used to create its world. So, too, may you powerfully convey through strong writing and a carefully placed em-dash the moving (no matter how dry) story of your client. Like beloved works of literature, any subject matter, in a lesser author’s hands, can be drivel.
So why do we treasure particular works of literature? For two reasons: We love the story, and we love how it is told. A good piece of writing must marry intriguing content with sophisticated presentation. As we learned on a dreary afternoon spent diagramming sentences in grammar school, style matters. It is no accident that one of the most important works of grammar William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style was co-written by a revered fiction author. Knowing and following the rules of grammar makes for crisp, clear, structured writing. (That devil on your shoulder insisting rules are made to be broken is not to be wholly ignored. But tame him; remind him that one can only break a rule after one has mastered it.)
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