Grammar: Gidgets and Gadgets Galore

This is a guest post by Joshua Aaron Jones, Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor, Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law.

Attorneys have evolved their tools from paper and quill to digital buttons and data. What once was in our heads and desktop books (remember dictionaries, thesauri, Strunk and White?) now exist in 0’s, 1’s, and promises. The perfect brief is only a click away! Just buy “this” program – no wait, “that” app. It’s in the cloud! The cloud! Fear not. The sky/cloud is not falling under the weight of new grammar check programs.

With all technology, the legal industry has a history of early alignment with the digital developers, without enough pause and consideration before adopting the snake oil offered. Of course, it’s a no-brainer to adopt some innovations, such as solutions to logistical and clerical matters. However, the avalanche of apps that erode professional skill and judgment should be held at bay, lest we drive our credentials to extinction.

For sure, we needed some of the great developments of the last half-century. This author cannot imagine practice without a word processor. Manual typing – as in, actual typing on an analog typewriter – was a physical, laborious aggravation. If there has never been a study on the enormous time-savings offered by the electric typewriter and then word processor, please alert your nearest empirical jurist. These inventions vastly increased clerical efficiency. However, the act of typing is a logistical, lower-level skill, not a matter of professional judgment, such as analysis and writing, and to be clear, this piece is not an argument against efficiency. Most technologies have revolutionized our services for the better. Yet, the current wave of artificial intelligence lubes a slippery slope, and grammar check software is the black diamond among them. They promise to let you blather on with wild abandon, ignoring comma-splices, run-on sentences, and noun-verb disagreement. Passive voice in an attorney’s writing may be ignored. Grammar check will fix it for you.

Wait, what? Our profession is rooted in educational rhetoric through writing and speech. We should be language ninjas. Students in the United States learn the litany of grammar rules before high school. Attorneys hone those skills over another seven years in college and law school. But we need grammar check software? Even if we allow that an attorney may be less than confident with independent and superior skill in the craft, why on Earth would we pay an extra premium for digital safeguards? Except for those who need added accommodations for disabilities, no attorney should pay for expensive grammar-check apps and subscriptions. It’s all built into Microsoft Word.

An appellate lawyer, especially a solo attorney, should realize that they already have equivalent help in the apps they use every day – Microsoft grammar and spell check. I’m a Mac man, but I have to hand it to Microsoft’s 2016 Office Suite. The updates to Word’s grammar and spell check options rival all the other apps. Given that some of the new language apps cost hundreds of dollars a year, in addition to the very product that you use most of the day, while the exact same functions are sitting in the Options menu, it’s no wonder new associates must bill 2000+ hours a year.

To access the proofing functions in Word, simply click on: File menu > Options > Proofing. From there, the sub-menu options are self-explanatory. For a walkthrough with screenshots, please visit my website. A writer can change their auto-correct options and select dozens of grammar check issues, including passive voice, colloquialisms, and personalization. You can even customize for “legal” styles. Table of contents? Table of authorities? Cross-refencing? It’s already on your machine! One can add whatever may (but is not) missing; simply find a plugin or add-on. You – and your students, if you are a teacher – do not need to pay extra for anything. Rather, you need to learn Microsoft Office’s full functionalities. Learn one Office app, and you are all set with the others.

Adobe, on the other hand, is not as robust for grammar and spell-check. Without the third-party add-on, MindGrammar, which only works with InCopy and InDesign, Adobe fans have only spell check. Yet, law practice needs the Adobe apps, especially Acrobat Pro, to fill the gaps that Microsoft opens – ease of Bate stamping, metadata removal, security, e-signing, and e-portal filing requirements. However, those necessary functions are more about logistics, graphics rendering, and universal accessibility, not the profession’s core skill – writing. Few of the newcomer grammar apps offer these functions. None have managed to synthesize the best necessities from Microsoft and Adobe. Thus, the Adobe app suite is still is a wise investment, as a companion to Microsoft Office.

If you are the appellate lawyer who stares in awe-and-wonder at the style headings menu, becomes enraged at the baffling “add space” or “remove” space before/after paragraph, has no idea that there are increase/decrease indent buttons, and didn’t know there is an options menu, dig deep, fellow jurist. Click, click, click. Exploration is the fastest route to proficiency. You cannot damage the apps. If Microsoft or Adobe thought you could destroy their programs (which implies a violation of the terms of service), they would hide the function. At the very least, see the Microsoft website or YouTube, both of which have hundreds, if not thousands, of tutorials on the various “hidden” features that illuminate your hard-bound copy of Shepard’s Citator this very moment.

I do not suggest that we should ignore the benefits of apps, such as WordRake (Suffolk’s new darling), BriefCatch (cozy at Oregon), Grammarly (anyone?), or the dozen other grammar/spell-check options available – some free, some hundreds of dollars a year, and all in a crowd of broad quality. It is unfortunate that k-12 and undergraduate shortcomings force law schools to remediate students’ basic language and grammar skills. However, if the academy continues to accommodate the current, failing, data-intensive model of American education, we will always see 1L’s who are ill-equipped to maneuver law school writing. Thus, these apps add value to the classroom, but post- juris doctor, surely attorneys have been well-remediated. Attorneys see the shiny new objects flash ads on our social media, and we click, buy, and send grammar skills to the trash folder.

As Occam theorized, “Entities should not be multiplied.” We assume that the legal industry needs greater technological innovation. The “new” grammar apps offer nothing towards greater efficiency; they merely muddy the waters and obscure what’s already there. Get back to basics, and throttle into the future.

Now, where are my Westlaw CD-ROMs? I need to finish this research so I can dictate a letter for my secretary to type-up in Word Perfect and email to opposing counsel via our office AOL email address on the personal computer? If that gobblasted Gen-Z intern is on my dial-up modem SpaceBooking again, she’ll just have to fax it.

Harsh over-exaggeration? A little bit. Truth? A little bit. The one thing that has remained the same, as all those technologies have fallen aside – Microsoft Office. Don’t waste your money. You already have the solutions.

Neither Microsoft, Adobe, Suffolk, University of Oregon, or any attorneys who lack a sense of humor have endorsed this article.