How Scare Quotes Are Saving Legal Writing, by Brendan Kenny, Lawyerist.com
Much has been written about the poor state of lawyers’ writing, but less about their punctuation. For years, grammarians and writing gurus have bemoaned misuses of quotation marks—and these misuses are legion. But for lawyers, quotation-mark abuse may not be so bad. And using scare quotes might be the beginning of better legal writing. That’s because lawyers put scare quotes on words, terms, and phrases they would not use otherwise. And if scare quotes make lawyers comfortable enough to start using more plain language, their use might be a good thing.
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