“The Lawyer as Professional Writer”
by Brandon J. Harrison
62 Arkansas Law Review 725 (2009)

Brandon Harrison starts by writing:

“Lawyers are professional writers.  If you practice law in Arkansas or anywhere else in the world, then you are by any practical definition a professional writer.  Accept it or not, it’s true.”

Harrison goes on to list key thoughts and steps to improve your writing skills as an attorney (and also as a student):

“Develop and hone your professional writer’s voice”

“Legal writing is a serious affair”

“Choose the right words”

“To write well is to think clearly”

“Architecture. Architecture. Architecture.”

“Read good writing”

“Make good writing habitual”

“You are also allowed, indeed encouraged, to be interesting”

“Paint with words”

“Now you know what to do, what will you do it?”

The article closes with advice from William Zinsser (On Writing Well):

“Ultimately….good writing rests on craft and always will.  I don’t know what still newer electronic marvels are waiting just around the corner to make writing twice as easy and twice as fast in the next 25 years.  But I do know they won’t make writing twice as good.  That will still require plain old hard work–clear thinking–and the plain old tools of the English language.”