Essential tool for professional writers
This is a very handy resource for almost every grammar and punctuation question imaginable. It's expensive, but for those of us who care about every detail of our writing, it's well worth the price.
A must have resource that is easy to use
A must have for the legal writer. The Red Book picks up where the Blue Book leaves off. Very useful, practical, easy to find information. Keep this beside you when you need a quick answer. Well worth the purchase.
(Almost) everything you should have wanted to know about legal writing, but didn't ask
This is a wonderful reference work on legal style--comprehensive, authoritative, well organized, and genuinely readable. It covers an incredible range of topics: punctuation, page layout, typography, spelling, grammar, usage, and more. It makes specific stylistic recommendations for many different types of legal documents, including business correspondence, research memos, pleadings, appellate briefs, and judicial opinions, to name just a few. And it's useful for anybody who has anything to do with creating legal documents, from judges and senior lawyers, to raw associates and law students, to legal secretaries; it would even be helpful to pro se litigants (as other reviewers have noted). I really wish that Amazon provided a "look inside" that showed the table of contents - the book covers an amazing amount of ground.
It's too bad that practitioners used to obfuscatory legalese, or who needlessly produce ugly, poorly written, unreadable documents, won't ever buy, much less read, this book. There's a lot of lousy legal writing churned out every day--bad not just in the sense that a writing teacher or design and typography professional wouldn't like it, but bad in the sense of being hard to read and understand and therefore, in the end, unpersuasive. This book is an antidote.
I recommend all of Bryan Garner's books, but this is the one to start with--it's the most general, and the most broadly useful. (If you write briefs, as I do, the second one to get is The Winning Brief). Every once in a while I would quibble with one of the rules Garner espouses, but for every such rule this book must have ten others that have taught me that, much to my chagrin, I (and almost every other lawyer I know) have been doing something wrong, without realizing it, for many years. I wish I'd discovered Garner much earlier; he's really helped me improve my writing and the way my documents look. Law offices ought to make The Redbook standard issue. That's not going to happen, sad to say, but I can't think of a better, more useful book to give to new lawyers about to start their first legal jobs. Or to senior lawyers who recognize that they don't know everything there is to know about legal writing.
One downside to this book is that, because it is so comprehensive, it sometimes will seem a little too basic. If you're really a good legal writer you may want to start with one of Garner's more "advanced" books. But you'd be amazed at how many legal writers seem not to have learned what is taught in high school English classes. And in any case, this book covers much important stuff that just isn't taught in law school, much less high school, and that most legal writers don't manage to pick up along the way.
Highly recommended.
A must-have
This book is a must-have for any attorney or law student's collection. I have used it to settle many debates among colleagues :)
time-tested excellence
I remember getting an earlier rendition of this book when I was in grade school, and now while in law school, it still comes in handy. If you are in any class or position where you need to write letters, compositions or just about anything else, you need this book. It will tell you when to use what word, when not to use what word, and is easy to use. Can't beat it!
