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Help For The Legislative Drafter: Part 2

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This column originally appeared in the November 2016 edition of North Carolina Lawyer.

By Laura Graham

In the most recent installment of Writing that Works, I introduced a fairly new resource for legal writers whose work includes drafting statutes and rules. The book, Plain English for Drafting Statutes and Rules,[1] is a slim volume, but it covers a lot of ground. In that column, I drew from the book to highlight three central principles of effective legislative drafting: (1) use simple declarative sentences; (2) punctuate with care; and (3) tabulate with clarity. In this follow-up column, I’ve chosen to highlight two additional principles.

Use “common and known words.” This principle is apparently one of the very first—and most enduring—legislative drafting principles. According to the authors of Plain English for Drafting Statutes and Rules, one of the most influential statements of this principle came in the late eighteenth century, when English jurist and philosopher and Jeremy Bentham wrote:

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