Tuesday, October 3, 2017

A Garner quiz

Bryan Garner offers a quiz in minimalist editing: “Eyes for Errors” (ABA Journal). How many errors, glaring and venial, can you spot?

Related reading
All OCA Garner-related posts (Pinboard)

comments: 2

Daughter Number Three said...

These examples made me realize how much I don't like reading legal writing, and also that legal writing has different rules of capitalization. I was marking all the capitalized instances of Defendant and City, for instance, yet those were not noted as incorrect. In journalistic writing they would be lower case.

Michael Leddy said...

The uncapitalized defendants threw me, as did the correction of significant. I thought APRTA was a venial, as Garner dislikes unexplained acronyms and initialisms. But perhaps we’re supposed to assume that this one’s been spelled out earlier, or that its meaning is obvious to lawyers (though not to me).