Law schools are sometimes faulted for not “teaching students to write well,” as if the goal were to mint stylists on demand. That’s not the complaint here. Let’s focus instead on a narrower problem: the concern that many graduates never learn even a small set of baseline drafting and advocacy ideas that every practicing lawyer should know. These are points so basic that they ought to be treated as shared professional grammar, not as optional refinements for aficionados.

Across education, the blame for weak writing is forever pushed downstream. Graduate schools grumble about what undergraduates never learned. Undergraduate programs lament what high schools failed to do. High schools fault the middle schools, which in turn blame the grade schools. The buck always moves backward. In law, there’s a parallel reflex: Law schools assume that practice will teach what they don’t, and the “school of experience” assumes that someone else already did. The result is a profession in which large numbers of lawyers have never even heard of certain simple, teachable litmus‑test rules that should be common ground.

Take the transactional lawyer, who builds documents rather than arguments. The competent drafter ought to know several elementary things. For example, provided that is so ambiguous and syntactically slippery that modern drafting literature treats it as effectively forbidden. The same literature warns against herein—not because it’s rare, but because it is treacherously common. It can refer to a subsection, a section or an entire agreement; readers and courts differ, and the resulting uncertainty invites trouble. Yet most graduates have never even heard that there’s any problem with either term.

Shall is another case in point. Careful drafting manuals urge drafters to reserve shall—if they’re to use the word at all—for obligations only. It should appear only where the phrase has a duty to can be substituted without changing meaning. Using shall to denote conditions, predictions or future events has produced decades of contractual and statutory confusion. Here again, the advice isn’t obscure. It’s plainly stated in readily available resources. But unless someone in law school treats these points as core professional knowledge—introduced, reinforced and tested—students understandably assume that the old language is harmless tradition.

Formatting tells a similar story. The better drafting texts strongly discourage phrases like five hundred (500), except in narrow settings where concerns about fraudulent alteration might justify the belt‑and‑suspenders approach. The duplication clutters the page and increases the risk of mismatch between words and numerals. Worse yet, an interpretive rule typically elevates the wrong element. Most new lawyers have never been told that there’s any problem with the practice. They pick it up from forms, treat it as normal and never learn that most experts regard it as a mark of unsophisticated drafting rather than a sign of care.

Definitions show the same pattern. Experienced drafters know that terms should be defined sparingly, precisely and only when needed. Definitions rarely belong in the plural and should never be tautological or circular. Each one should be a blade sharpened for use; multiply them needlessly, and the edge turns back on the hand that wields it. These ideas aren’t mere matters of taste. They’re basic techniques for controlling meaning and preventing disputes. Yet many students leave law school without ever writing a contract or statute under standards that force them to think this way and to justify every defined term on the page.

For litigators, whose craft lies in persuasion rather than construction, the deficits are just as familiar. Ask experienced judges or practitioners to describe the first page of the average motion, and the answer is often the same: formbook filler. Paragraphs full of passive murk and self‑referential throat‑clearing—as stated below, as shown herein, as will be discussed later. What should that first page do? It should clearly and nondogmatically state the problem the court must decide. The issue should be framed in jargon-free English and introduced briskly beneath the caption.

If you can’t articulate the concrete issue at stake by Page 1, you waste the most important opportunity to persuade. Persuasive writing begins with clarity, which in turn begins with structure. It’s striking how many court papers (more than 90%?) fail this test—and how rarely students see it consistently modeled. To speak plainly isn’t to “dumb down”; it’s to respect both the reader and the client. When a curriculum treats plain structure as an afterthought, students understandably conclude that page‑long openings and foggy framing are simply how lawyers sound, not warning signs of weak thinking.

For decades, the standard answer has been: “They’ll learn it in practice.” Law schools supply doctrine, analysis and critical habits; partners and senior associates supply the granular discipline of documents. That assumption quietly assigns the real teaching of these litmus‑test basics to the “school of experience.” The difficulty is that this school isn’t teaching them. A large segment of the profession has never even heard of the problems with provided that, herein, promiscuous shall, doubled numbers, bloated definitions and failed issue-framing. These are only examples. You can’t rely on mentors to pass along what they themselves never learned.

Once you recognize that, the focus shifts. The central problem is not only what happens in law school classrooms, but what happens—and doesn’t happen—in the culture of practice. Forms and boilerplate circulate relatively unexamined, and young lawyers learn to copy them. Partners are rushed and overburdened, and many have never been exposed to the modern drafting literature. The “school of experience” rewards speed, not reflection. It reinforces inherited habits, however flawed; and it rarely pauses to ask whether those habits actually serve readers, clients or courts.

None of this denies that legal education does much that is valuable. Clinics and simulation courses have multiplied, and many first‑year programs now take writing more seriously than they once did. Students are exposed to negotiation, alternative dispute resolution, legislation and advanced writing courses that stress practice‑ready skills. Yet even in these settings, the emphasis falls unevenly on the baseline items just sketched. The culture rewards brilliance in theory and citation more reliably than mastery of shall, avoidance of provided that and herein, and so on. Those basics aren’t glamorous enough to headline a seminar or to drive hiring and promotion.

The irony is that the fix is conceptually straightforward. Every point described here can be taught through direct instruction and regular feedback. Show students what not to do. Create a culture in which they’re taught a few critical fundamentals at every stage of their careers.

Mind you, I’m not saying that they’d be able to write well. But they’d be analogous to golf-academy students who know how to grip the club properly or carpentry apprentices who’ve learned table-saw safety. We should stop comforting ourselves with the thought that lawyers will pick up these points from experience. The current “school of experience” has had decades to teach them, and it hasn’t.

Unlike engineers or accountants or other professionals, lawyers work with one tool—the word. With it they shape thought, command judgment, define power and distribute justice. Law schools already shoulder many missions: advancing scholarship, serving public institutions and preparing students for a changing profession. The question is whether legal education, in tandem with a practice culture that neglects the basics, is doing enough to ensure that every graduate leaves with a reliable command of the fundamental tools of legal language. On that narrow point, the documents crossing your desk will answer more honestly than any course catalogue.

Bryan A. Garner. (Photo by Karolyne H.C. Garner)

Bryan A. Garner is the author of The Winning Brief, Garner’s Modern English Usage and Legal Writing in Plain English.