An elongated if thoughtful plea for plainspoken formulation of legal documents.

The profession’s verbosity originated, among other places, in the 16th-century English filing fee, based on page count. It’s an enemy of clarity. Sentence structure is usually more important than technical considerations.

Schedules upfront, as a table of contents, demonstrate efficiency and ability to prioritize importance / sequence: giving readers what they expect promotes comprehension. Consider placing definitions at the end of a document, in a glossary.

There are four elements in a legislative draft: case, condition (qualification), subject, and legal action (the subject’s scope). In a clause, if a condition is material, put it first to establish the baseline of action; otherwise use a subject-predicate construction.

The law is ‘constantly speaking, so provisions can be applied to different circumstances as they arise, so present tense can often be applied, leading to simpler sentence structure. Shall is either first person future or an imperative which can be replaced by must or is. Will is future tense, not an imperative.

Dictionary of Latin terms and modern equivalents, p. 232.