|
|
 |
About LaWin |
|
|
|
Intelligent Search |
|
|
|
|
|
|
News |
| |
| The Secret to Writing Persuasively |
| 2013-05-27 |
|
By Gary Kinder
About the Author
Gary Kinder has taught more than 1,000 writing programs for the ABA and to firms including Jones Day, WilmerHale and Sidley during the past 25 years. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. In 2011 he founded the software company WordRake, which last summer released the first editing software for lawyers.
____________________________________________________________________
We lawyers have a single job: to use words to get people to do things we want them to do; people like judges and opposing counsel; things like grant our motion and give ground. But who teaches us how to do this? A mentor, perhaps, if he or she has time? We don’t get it in law school.
I learned it about three years after I graduated. I had decided not to practice law but to devote my career to writing. Any writer determined to earn a living has to figure out how to get people to pay for the privilege of reading what he has written. After I learned the secret, I had to live with it for a while before I internalized it, but while pursuing food for the table, I figured out how to write persuasively. Then I got published and later taught the secret to other lawyers.
CAPTURE YOUR READER’S IMAGINATION
A few years ago I met with a San Francisco lawyer (let’s call him Demetri) who had written a brief for a client (let’s call the client Avennia) that wholesaled specialty glass bottles for wineries in California. The president of the company (we’ll call her Marsha) had defected to a start-up competitor. Avennia had sued Marsha for violating her noncompete clause and for using trade secrets and confidential business information she had learned at Avennia to build the new competitor’s business.
When Demetri filed the complaint, Marsha’s lawyer demanded that Avennia turn over all of its records. Demetri was willing to allow the lawyer full discovery but wanted a protective order guaranteeing that only the lawyer would see the documents. In his motion to persuade the judge, Demetri wrote this paragraph:
From its experience in supplying specialty glass to the California wine industry, Avennia has built a unique and valuable set of trade secrets in addition to its unique and valuable confidential business information. Avennia’s trade secrets and confidential business information include, among other things, voluminous, detailed, unique customer lists, vendor lists, and customer purchase histories. These trade secrets and confidential business information are extremely unique and valuable.
Most of the demand letters and argument sections I see sound just like Demetri’s paragraph, little more than a lawyer’s opinion. It’s shocking to hear this, I know, but no one cares what we think. They want to know how we got there.
THE KEY TO A LAWYER’S PROFESSIONAL LIFE
In my writing courses I never suggest the lawyers write one thing I say until near the end of the day, when I urge them to write one sentence, which I dictate. I tell them to go back to the office, type the sentence, select a nice font, blow it up, boldface it and print those words on a piece of paper; then laminate that paper, punch two holes at the top, tie a string between the two holes, hang it on their computer and read it every day. Several times a day. This is the sentence: “If you tell them, they will not believe you; if you show them, they have no choice but to agree.”
This is the key to living a fulfilled life while practicing law.
Let’s break Demetri’s words into two categories. About half are conclusions, Demetri’s own: “unique and valuable,” “voluminous,” “detailed,” “confidential.” All conclusions are abstract: I can’t picture Demetri’s “voluminous.”
The rest are pure abstractions, not Demetri’s opinion, but when he writes “experience,” “specialty glass,” “trade secrets,” “customer lists,” “vendor lists,” “customer purchase histories,” I still see nothing. If you want to persuade me, you must allow me to “see.”
A TALK WITH DEMETRI
After reading Demetri’s brief, I asked him several questions. He had ready answers for them all except the last. Our conversation went something like this:
“Why are these lists so valuable?”
“Avennia has been in business for 47 years.”
“That’s a long time,” I said.“What’s in the lists?”
“The lists,” said Demetri, “contain the name of virtually every winery in California—almost 2,800 of them.
“I can get those off the Internet,” I said.
“But the lists contained the name of the purchasing agent at each winery.” “What else?”
“And the agent’s phone numbers at work and at home.”
“Keep going.”
“And what kinds of wine each winery produced each year.”
“And?”
“And how many cases of bottles the winery had purchased each year for the past 25 years.”
“Anything else?”
“What styles of bottles, what colors of bottles, how many the winery bought in each style and each color.”
Then I asked him a question that confounded him:
“How tall was the pile?”
“Of what, the lists, the printout?”
I nodded.
“Almost 6 inches.”
“Why didn’t you put all of this in your brief?”
That’s the question he couldn’t answer.
DEMETRI’S PLOT THICKENS
DEMETRI 方案的模糊之处
When I asked him what he meant by “trade secrets,” things got really interesting. I started with a pointed question to goad him.
“What could possibly be secretive about glass bottles?”
“The bottles are special.”
“How so?”
“They’re made only in France.”
“So get them in France.”
“That’s what the competitors do.”
“So there’s really no secret.”
“Once you purchase them, you have to get them back to the U.S.”
“Fly ’em,” I said.
“Too expensive. Way too expensive. You have to send them by ship.”
“How do you get them to the ship?”
“Exactly.”
“That’s the secret?”
“One of them.”
I waited.
“There are only two ways to move the bottles to a port city from the factory in France—train or truck. But empty wine bottles shipped by train rotate in their packing crates, which scratches the glass, making them less desirable, even useless.”
Then the light appeared in Demetri’s eyes, and he talked faster.
“But most of the roads are rough, and the bottles still spin, just not as much. After years and years of experimenting, Avennia’s founder devised a way to keep the bottles from rotating and developed specific routes across smoother road surfaces leading from the factory to the closest seaport. And all of the information about the French trucking companies, shipping companies, methods of packing, special routing along back roads, was contained in the very records my opponent wanted Marsha to review.”
If Demetri “shows” the judge what he has just “shown” me, the judge can “see” why these documents cannot be turned over to a defendant already being sued for misappropriating trade secrets and confidential business information. “Extremely unique and valuable” doesn’t do it.
“Let me ask you again,” I said.
“Why didn’t you put this in your brief? It’s fascinating.”
This time he had an answer.
“I didn’t think it was that important.”
THE WRAP 秘笈总结
No one teaches us how to draw a judge or opposing counsel into the place where our story comes alive, yet this is where understanding dwells. You cannot lure your readers there with strings of abstractions and opinions; they won’t go. You must use words they can see. English teachers call this preferring the concrete to the abstract. Writers, at least the ones who eat, call it The Writer’s Creed: Don’t tell me, show me. It is what focuses your readers on your client’s unique situation, and when you take them there, when they see the vivid pictures you have painted, sympathy and empathy abound. Then you get them to do what you want them to do, which is your job. |
| [Back] |
|
|
|
