How to write good Judgment by clear writing with purposeful sentences?

Winning with clear writing. Sounds familiar? Yeah many authors refer to "Clear writing" generating "Win Win situation" for writer and same is  in the case of judgments.

Courts in India are full of cases of different types and hence  "high workload".

Now we often see lengthy briefs and judgments. At certain time they are even left unread. Why? No Point to point writing i.e. lack of purposeful writing. And that's what our principle no. 1 states. 

Principle No. 1:  Every sentence — and every word in the sentence — needs a purpose.  Both the writer and the reader should understand that purpose.  Sentences without purposes should be cut.  A writer should cut sentences without purposes.  Several legal writers have been recommending purposeful statement making.  

Now as I mentioned at that start of the article these briefs and important documents left unread.Now look at this - The case concerns whether the defendants gave the plaintiff fraudulent financial information: 

Plaintiff’s characterizations of the financial information provided by Defendants do not change the undisputed facts that Defendants never held out the financial information as being anything other than estimates of expenses and net income for commercial property to be constructed in the future.

What’s the purpose of this sentence?  It arguably has several points:  (1) the defendants told the plaintiff that the relevant financial information was an estimate; (2) undisputed facts prove this point; and (3) the plaintiffs’ characterizations do not change the undisputed facts. 

A reader, though, can’t tell which point is most essential. 

To solve this problem we have Principle No. 2

Principle No. 2:  Readers value any moment in a sentence when the grammatical structure comes to a full halt.

This simply means, the statement should be bifurcated and that simplifies things for everyone. The concentration should be on where to use punctuation, halts like commas, full stops.  

To restate this principle, convey only one point per stress position.  In the example above, the author used one stress position — a period — but tried to convey at least three different points.  Assuming that those points are all important, consider this revised draft that conveys one point per stress position.

Here, summary judgment is warranted based on an undisputed fact:  the defendants told the plaintiff that the relevant financial information was an estimate.  The plaintiff’s characterization of this fact does not change its undisputed nature.

This could probably be tightened further, but the stress positions focus the reader on the key points:  (1) there is a critical undisputed fact; (2) the defendants told the plaintiff that the data was merely an estimate; and (3) the plaintiff’s characterizations don’t change the analysis.  This one trick created a powerful effect.  Give this a try with a brief you’re writing now.

Now as we know these two principles about clear writing I hope these principles help you to clear you thought process for writing to "Win"

The article modified from another article.

Link to original article: http://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/clear-writing-through-purposeful-sentenc-47584/