The Case For Contractions

Two journals—the West Virginia Law Review and the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy—have recently returned their first round edits to me.  Both journals did a splendid job on all fronts and, I find myself indebted to, and humbled by, some highly talented and dedicated student editors. 

Still, I want to harp on one issue.  Both journals, like the other journals where I have published, have asked me to refrain from contractions:  write “do not,” not “don’t,” and say “cannot,” not “can’t.”  I know that their suggestions, earnest and sensible, are motivated by an utterly sane desire to present a finished product that appears more mature, more professional. 

Yet, I tend to doubt that contractions in fact undermine their author’s credibility and seriousness. 

I know that few us can write as well as this guy (how I would be gratified simply to acquire the sobriquet of The Poor Man’s Don Herzog. . . .), but doesn’t the great—nay, the one and only—Don Herzog demonstrate in grand style that amazing ideas needn’t be leaded with the patina of formalistic prose? 

Can’t we make the case that the idiom of legal scholarship is already too damn stiff and formal, and, let’s be honest, often too dreary to slog through, after a long day of teaching and committee meetings and packed office hours and a nerve wracking drive on I-75 back to the suburbs of Weston at 8 pm from Miami Gardens?  Can’t we have a good dollop of humor, sarcasm, and mischief—and all of it seasoned with contractions—which can help the writing, and their attendant insights, go down easier?

Anyone interested in my modest call for reform? Won't cha consider it?

 

Comments

[Alan Rau]

Every time I used to submit articles to student-edited law reviews I would have to spend a week working at getting the article back to the way it was at the very beginning, before their "edit," brushing aside their obsessiveness and their self importance and their pomposity. Contractions were a part of it. Insistence on useless gerunds after citations ("noting that, "stating that," "opining that...."---how many synonyms are in their style book? ) were another. The final straw was their refusal to countenance the "I": I was expected to say, "The author believes. . . ." I wrote them: "Alan Rau does not refer to himself in the third person"---and yanked the article in favor of a non-student journal. It was a great decision, and I've done the same thing ever since.

[Jarod Bona]

I concur. In addition, I don't see a problem with contractions in legal briefs. Contractions make prose more readable and I think that is a worthy goal for both legal briefs and law review articles. Perhaps there are people out there that are offended when they read something with a contraction. But we are late enough into the plain english movement for legal writing that I imagine that demographic is shrinking every year.

[Burton Carter]

cha is mispelt. it should be you!!