As you read, so will you write. If you read nothing but pulp novels and tabloid newspapers, you will write like them. Most lawyers have probably not descended to that level of recreational reading material—but alas, their everyday professional, nonrecreational reading is (literally speaking) even worse. Lawyers tend to be bad writers because their profession condemns them to a diet of bad reading material. The very highest they go up the literary ladder, so to speak, is judicial opinions—which are widely read not, heaven knows, because they are well written (nor even because they are necessarily well reasoned) but because they are authoritative.-Antonin Scalia & Bryan Garner, Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges
1 comment:
Far be it from me to disagree with such an authority. But I contend that reading anything at all is better than what many condemn themselves to these days-reading nothing at all. Even "pulp novels and tabloid newspapers," is a step up.
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