LawProse

You occasionally hear someone say that none requires a singular verb: None is there, never None are there. Is that right?
Unequivocally no. For more than 1,200 years, English speakers and writers have said none are—especially in sentences like None of them are, where the subject is None (not them). In fact, None of them are is more than twice as common in modern print as...

You face several challenges as a writer, some of which you might not even be fully conscious of. But the big ones are obvious:
“I don’t have the time!” The reality is that you must have the time. You must make the time. Lawyers must write more efficiently today than ever before. The good news is that you can learn a four-step technique to enhance speed and quality—no matter...

 For purposes of this lesson, the term professional football player (hyphenated when functioning as a phrasal adjective) means “lexicographer.”
In law, the “professional-football-player rule” is the principle that a drafter may explicitly define terms in ways that are peculiar to the legal instrument in which they appear. The rule is especially common in the field of patents, where an inventor...

 Given that the law is a profession whose sole tool is language, it’s hardly surprising that the legal profession—especially those at the top of it—are fixated on it. The most penetrating scholarly commentators discuss legal language astutely. The same...