Plain English for Lawyers |
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Page 27
... John kicks the ball , " is in the active voice . John is the subject , and John does the acting : he kicks the ball . When you use a verb in the passive voice , the subject of the sentence is acted upon . " The ball is kicked by John ...
... John kicks the ball , " is in the active voice . John is the subject , and John does the acting : he kicks the ball . When you use a verb in the passive voice , the subject of the sentence is acted upon . " The ball is kicked by John ...
Page 28
... John will have kicked the ball Passive The ball was kicked by John The ball is kicked by John The ball will be kicked by John The ball has been kicked by John The ball had been kicked by John The ball will have been kicked by John 28 Plain ...
... John will have kicked the ball Passive The ball was kicked by John The ball is kicked by John The ball will be kicked by John The ball has been kicked by John The ball had been kicked by John The ball will have been kicked by John 28 Plain ...
Contents
Omit Surplus Words | 7 |
Use Base Verbs Not Nominalizations | 23 |
The Passive Can Create Ambiguity | 30 |
Copyright | |
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Common terms and phrases
action active voice adjectives agreement ambiguity American Legal Usage Answers apostrophe attorney fees attorney-client privilege avoid base verb claim client trust collateral estoppel colon compound contract corporate counsel court David Mellinkoff defendant Defendant's dictionary Elegant variation element Ernest Gowers example Exercise express fact filed following passage glue words hyphen independent clauses injunction instance intentional International Business Machines interrogatories issue John The ball join two independent Jose Cruz jurors jury jury instructions kicked by John kicked the ball Law Review lawyer legal writing litigation ment modify motion notice noun chains object omitting surplus words ordinary English parentheses party passive voice person phrase plaintiff pronoun punctuation put a comma question quotation Randolph Quirk reader reason revised Rewrite these sentences Rudolf Flesch semicolon Sense & Nonsense sentence looks Sidney Greenbaum statute supra note syntactic tence testimony tion trial judge truncated passive witness word-wasting idioms words underlined