The Style Edict 2.0

Everyone at Criterion Economics writes clearly. And that includes masticating and digesting the following rules. Since 1992, those rules have addressed the most frequently recurring edits that I have found necessary to make on drafts of professional documents.

What are the most productive increments in writing about law, about economics, and about the economic analysis of law? A singular paper that Judge Richard Posner assigned to me on my first day of work as his law clerk was George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language. If you have doubts about good composition, read Orwell’s essay and then quickly munch The Elements of Style by Strunk & White. If you have a few years available, a newer and more ambitious clarion is Bryan Garner’s collection of books on modern usage.  And if ever you measure out your life with coffee spoons, read Posner.

For 34 years so far, I have updated this memorandum periodically to identify any other common problems of composition or style. Thank you for respecting these expectations as you draft or edit Criterion documents.

Do not mistake any of this guidance for drudgery. Revising a sentence is not the chore that precedes the writing; it is the writing. An economist will recognize the principle at work. By the envelope theorem, the value of an optimized thing is revealed in the act of optimizing it: once you are at the margin, the small adjustments through which you arrived no longer move the value, and what remains is the worth of the thing itself, now visible because you bothered to find it. So too with prose. You do not know what a paragraph is worth until you have combined and recombined its words—time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions—and the worth you discover was always latent in the words, waiting for a writer patient enough to optimize toward it.

Sometimes the optimum lies outside the words you have, and you must enlarge the set. Hayek, expounding in English, reached for the German Machbarkeit because no English word held the precise idea he needed. I once went looking for a word to name the opposite of exceed yet found that the English language had inexplicably left the space empty. So I recommend the new word subcede. No lack of success will be as discomfiting as subcess.