The Appellate Record : Texas Appellate Lawyer & Attorney Kendall Gray for Fifth Circuit & Supreme Court Appeals

Hat tip to sodahead.com

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My wife knows the tremendous burden I must bear.

The burden of constantly being right.

About everything.

All. The. Time.

**sigh**

It has happened again.

Recently, in the Texas Lawyer, I wrote about how unforced time for incubation was essential to creativity. Allowing the brain to do seemingly nothing is the ingredient without which insight or inspiration will not happen.

But law practice actually discourages down time and "incubation." So, I tried to come up with ways we can preserve the brain space we need to be effective, like:

• Setting aside time to sit and be quiet
• Exercising or taking a walk in the middle of the day to re-boot
• Weaning yourself from your computer screens
• Learning to say no, so that each project gets the incubation time it requires.

Little did I realize the power of the Appellate Record echo chamber. In rapid succession, several pieces appeared in the New York Times or on the BBC confirming just how right we were. Check out:

• Brain, Interrupted in the Times about how toggling between devices and distractions is impairing and reshaping our cognitive function.
• BBC Radio 4's program about Digital Detox and why we need to control our devices.
• This piece from the Times about how a walk through green space can ease brain fatigue and focus the mind, even in kids with ADHD.
• And THIS PIECE from the times about the potential link between inadequate sleep and behaviors that doctors label as ADHD.

Preserve that creative stuff between your ears. As Vice President Quayle rightly observed, "What a terrible thing to have lost one's mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is."

Now, pardon me while I check my Facebook.

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The event is finally here--meaning I can almost stop working on this project and return to normal life.

This Friday, April 26, 2013, is the Exceptional Legal Writing seminar at the Texas Law Center in Austin.

Part of my presentation on "Clarity and Grace" includes an investigation to see if the concepts taught by Joseph M. Williams hold true for legal writers the same way that they do for academic writers. To give that investigation some scientifical truthiness, I subjected three chief justices to a randomized, scientific trial.

I wanted to see if the judges known for clear and graceful writing crafted their prose like Williams said they ought to. I also wanted to see if the Williams DNA was absent in a chief justice whose prose was hard to read.

But don't worry. No Chiefs were harmed in the making of this presentation.

The results very clear, even if we ought not be surprised by them. There is no such thing as good legal writing. There is only good writing and lousy writing. The topic does not matter. The topic does not change what you need to do to engage your reader.

I hope you can attend.

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Anybody remember what these are?

These are the basic forms used for diagramming the parts of speech in a sentence.

If you are a person of a certain age, and if you took middle school English before American education got all soft and wobbly, then you had to diagram sentences.

If you don't recognize these, then your education was rubbish and you are to be pitied, you poor, empty-headed, millennial hipster.

But I digress.

I have Mrs. Gee and her "old school" instruction to thank for my knowledge of this little tool. At the time, I thought she was nuts. "I'm never going to use this."

Boy, was I wrong. In preparing my paper and presentation for the "Exceptional Legal Writing" seminar, I discovered that the skills taught by Mrs. Gee are the ones that count. If you want to write and be understood, get a grasp of sentence diagrams.

After the jump, a hymn of praise to the sentence diagram.

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For want of some serial commas, Rachel Ray kills puppies and engages in cannibalism.

Allegedly.

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Hat Tip to KeepCalmAndPosters.com

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I am still in the process of trying to write my paper for the Exceptional Legal Writing Course to be given by the State Bar on April 26.

So it is only fair that you suffer along with me.

The challenge for me is how to make something abstract interesting. How do you make clear writing . . . clear? How do we know when good is good?

One way that worked for me was to find a good piece of strong writing and then ruin it. Take something taut and reverse engineer it into something you'd find in a law school or the Environmental Protection Agency.

(Governments and institutions are particularly good at removing all humanity from the written word. They are kind of the neutron bomb for prose.)

After the jump, a teaser.

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