the Zealous

A federal district court in Massachusetts has reminded all of us legal drafters that even the most trivial article in the English language can make or break your client's case.

Software coder Eric Suh writes, in a piece entitled, Writing code and prose:

One of the most important qualities for effective programming in large codebases is good writing ability—not writing code, but writing prose for other humans.
 
Undoubtedly, this is not a surprise to long-time industry veterans (after all, we don't often program in machine code anymore), but it's a quality I often find is overlooked by engineers that arrive straight out of college. Those that I see write the cleanest, most maintainable code are those who write prose well, whether in documentation, in emails, or in their everyday lives.
 
Many aphorisms about writing style translate fairly well to coding. Consider the following selection of principles from The Elements of Style by Strunk and White:

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The latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences contains a fascinating article entitled Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions:

Are judicial rulings based solely on laws and facts? Legal formalism holds that judges apply legal reasons to the facts of a case in a rational, mechanical, and deliberative manner. In contrast, legal realists argue that the rational application of legal reasons does not sufficiently explain the decisions of judges and that psychological, political, and social factors influence judicial rulings. We test the common caricature of realism that justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast” in sequential parole decisions made by experienced judges.

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