Tip 1: Keep your sentences short

Many law students I have come across in the past think that they can increase their assignment grade by making their essay appear as a high quality piece of writing. Unfortunately, this often means that they use lengthy sentences which they themselves don’t understand too well. But good legal writing is all about making the text easy to understand and readable. Long sentences that take more than three lines hardly ever achieve that aim.

To illustrate my point, have a look at the two sentences below and decide for yourself which one is easier to read and understand:

Example 1:

The fact that the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, which was originally coined by A V Dicey, exists in the UK was clearly reflected in s. 4(6)(a) of the Human Rights Act 1998 specifying that the granting of a declaration of incompatibility with respect to a piece of legislation does not affect the validity, continuing operation or enforcement of the provision in respect of which it is given.

Example 2:

The principle of parliamentary sovereignty was originally coined by A V Dicey. Its existence in the UK was clearly reflected in s. 4(6)(a) of the Human Rights Act 1998. The section specifies that even where the courts grant a declaration of incompatibility with respect to a particular provision, this does not affect the validity, continuing operation or enforcement of that provision.

As you can see in the last sentence in the second example, it is not always possible to make all sentences very short. That’s perfectly fine. You should avoid writing lengthy sentences as much as possible. If the majority of sentences in your essay are fairly short, then your reader will be able to follow the few lengthy ones.

Although it’s not always easy to keep your sentences short when writing the first draft of your essay, when revising your draft you should break down any sentences that are longer than three lines. A good way to make sure that your legal writing is not too complex is by running your essay through the Hemingway App.

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Tip 2: Don’t use words you don’t understand

One big mistake that some law students make (and which makes their legal writing worse) is using complex words that they don’t fully understand themselves. This often happens because they have read a journal article that they didn’t exactly comprehend, and they are trying to insert a part of it into their essay by paraphrasing it.

If you’ve ever made that mistake, know that this will definitely not help you to get a good mark for your law paper - quite the opposite. You might think that your essay is of a very high standard, because you cannot fully understand it yourself. But your lecturer will easily be able to pick up on the fact that you have simply paraphrased a legal article without completely comprehending it.

What’s more, by doing this you are risking being reported for plagiarism or failing the assignment altogether. That’s not to say that you should avoid incorporating opinions from journal articles into your law essays. It just means that you should use a quotation and paste the text directly into your essay, giving attribution to the author of the article (*Only use this as long as the quotation is no longer than two lines).

Alternatively, when paraphrasing the text you should first read and understand it, then close the article and write the points made by the author in your own words. This is a much better approach than using the original sentence structures from the article and only paraphrasing the individual words with the help of a dictionary. I have included an example of what I mean below.

Original text from the journal

The principle of parliamentary sovereignty was originally coined by A V Dicey. Its existence in the UK was clearly reflected in s. 4(6)(a) of the Human Rights Act 1998. The section specifies that even where the courts grant a declaration of incompatibility with respect to a particular provision, this does not affect the validity, continuing operation or enforcement of that provision.

Poor paraphrasing

The assumption of parliamentary sovereignty was primitively contrived by A V Dicey. Its endurance in the UK was incontrovertibly echoed in s. 4(6)(a) of the Human Rights Act 1998. The section cites that even where the courts allocate a declaration of incompatibility with respect to a precise provision, this does not disturb the soundness, chronic instrumentality or impulsion of that provision.

Good paraphrasing

Parliamentary sovereignty finds its origins in a doctrine proposed by A V Dicey. S. 4(6)(a) of the Human Rights Act 1998 is an excellent example of its continued presence in the UK. According to that section, a declaration of incompatibility awarded by the courts does not impact the validity, continued operation or enforcement of the provision with respect to which it was granted.

Tip 3: Use standard legal academic sentence structures

Although not many students know about it, most legal journals are written in the so-called legal academic writing style. This is also the style that you should aim to use when writing your law assignments. While there is no single official guide to the legal writing style, it can be learned by studying several journal articles and identifying certain repetitive sentence structures which show up in those articles.

Once you identify those structures, you should stick to them and try to apply them to your law essays. This will help you to easily write clear and concise papers that don’t sound awkward. Here are a few good examples of those types of sentence structures which are a part of the legal academic writing style:

The purpose of this essay is to…

As explained earlier in this essay,...

In the case of Donogue v Stevenson the courts decided...