How to Write Well

Bryan A. Garner is president of LawProse, Inc., Distinguished Research Professor of Law at Southern Methodist University, and editor-in-chief of Black’s Law Dictionary. He is the author of Legal Writing in Plain English and The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Garner is the author of the best-selling books Garner’s Modern English Usage and, with Justice Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts and Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges.

• How to Use This BookIntroductionPart One: How Writers Think and WorkThe Writer’s Mindset1. Adopt a writerly attitude.2. Demand specific, well-formed ideas from yourself.3. Picture your readers and address them directly.4. Be conversational and sincere, not stiff and stuffy.5. Cherish simplicity.The Writer’s Habits and Tools6. Read professionally edited prose daily. Pay attention to language everywhere.7. Write every day. Don’t wait for inspiration.8. Learn the art of ruthless selectivity.9. Develop a self-teaching, self-critical habit.10. Build courage to risk clear, committed statements.11. Create a favorable writing environment.12. Build your vocabulary with purpose.13. Keep a usage guide and a style manual within reach—and get familiar with them.14. Make your research retrievable.15. If you use AI, frame your prompts well and maintain editorial control.The Writing Process16. Brainstorm, plan, draft, revise.17. Discover what you have to say and then shape it into a blueprint.18. Before you write in full, reconsider your structure. Remember the “rule of three.”19. Working from your blueprint, compose as swiftly as you can.20. Improve what you’ve written before sharing it.21. Tighten your prose relentlessly. Welcome edits from others.Part Two: How Strong Prose Looks and BehavesGuiding the Reader22. Orient your readers immediately, without cryptic “insider” talk.23. To persuade the unreceptive reader, address the obvious objections to your position.24. Keep your promises. Once you announce what you’re doing, carry through.25. Be concrete, specific, and vivid.26. Use acronyms and other abbreviations sparingly.27. Pace your ideas. Word your sentences gracefully.28. Use interesting wordings, not pedestrian ones.29. Whenever you can, replace inert verbs with livelier ones.30. Understand and capitalize on the positions of emphasis, especially beginnings and endings.31. Shape and link your paragraphs.32. Avoid thrusting yourself into the foreground.Core Grammatical Points33. Forget the martinet’s simplistic rules.34. Prefer But to However at the beginning of a sentence, and don’t put a comma after the But.35. Don’t fret about split infinitives or sentence-ending prepositions.36. Place your adverbs carefully.37. Master subject-verb agreement and pronoun cases.38. Take care with either and neither.39. Mind the words that, which, and who.40. Insist on parallelism.41. Prefer subordinate clauses to coordinate ones.Essentials of Punctuation42. Without dogmatizing about the serial comma, adopt a convention.43. Avoid extraneous commas.44. Don’t fuse independent clauses with a comma and don’t break one independent clause with a period.45. Learn some easy rules for plurals and possessives.46. Hyphenate your phrasal adjectives but don’t hyphenate most prefixed terms.47. Use long dashes guiltlessly but not excessively.Part Three: How to Come into Your OwnWriting for Life48. Play with simile and metaphor.49. Have fun when you write.50. Never stop learning.AcknowledgmentsIndex

“Garner is perhaps the world’s premier authority on grammar and usage in English.”