Modern Tendencies and Characteristics of Legal Writing in English for Specific Purposes

• Author: Greta Përgjegji
• Position: Albanian Academy of Armed Forces
• Pages: 102-107

IIPCCL Publishing, Tirana-Albania

Academic Journal of Business, Administration, Law and Social Sciences Vol. 1 No. 3

November 2015

ISSN 2410-3918

Acces online at www.iipccl.org

102

Modern Tendencies and Characteristics of Legal Writing in English for

Specific Purposes

MSc. Greta Përgjegji

Albanian Academy of Armed Forces

Abstract

The article with the title ‘’Modern tendencies and characteristics of Legal Writing in English

for Specific Purposes’’ deals with the study of legal writing and its teaching in professional

linguistic contexts, where writing is considered as a means of communication between two

communities that have different languages, but share the same knowledge or expertise. The

article describes some key features of legal writing as part of Writing for Specific Purposes.

The historical background gives a hint on how the legal writing was considered at its

beginnings, how it evolved and how it was taught through years. It also discusses the

controversial issue whether writing should be taught together with the legal reasoning or

not, taking into consideration the fact that the process of writing itself for most students is

considered to be of a more complicated nature than the process of the legal reasoning. The

characteristics of legal writing describe the specificities and the intricacies that the legal jargon

implies, the archaic words, wordiness and the awkward sentence structure. Modern tendencies

place emphasizes on another aspect of legal writing nowadays; that of writing in Plain English

which implies a breaking of the cycle of the complicated writing toward a simplified way of

writing, through a tiring and long process of writing where the reader is at the center of it.

This means that every writing has been produced having the reader in mind implying that

the general public that does not have a legal background should be able to understand it.

Keywords: Legal writing, professional context, Plain English, Legalese, Writing for Specific

Purposes.

Introduction

Writing is an important part in the professional life of a lawyer. It is a very complicated

productive skill in which the lawyer or the paralegal has to practice a lot. Writing in a

professional context doesn’t make the life of the writer easy and it becomes even

more difficult when this writing occurs in a second language, since while writing the

writer has to take into consideration the social and the cultural context or aspect in

which it occurs. The reasons might be different starting from the fact that the mother

tongue and the second language do not have the same structures.

Legal writing as one of the types of ESP writing is one of the most complicated ones,

since the writing process here doesn’t imply only the physical aspect of it but also the

legal reasoning that is behind it. A good piece of writing in Legal English means a lot

of practice in learning how to write it, after the writer has gathered the information

done the reasoning and at the putting everything into black on white.

Legal writing has undergone through a long way to become what is now, in the sense

that it has changed through time, since different approaches have been used. One of

the problematic matter related to it is the legal jargon or differently known as the