Publisher's Notebook

Frank L. Visco is a New York-based copywriter who hit gold in 1986 with a piece in Writer’s Digest. Entitled “How to Write Good,” the article provides 23 pointers on … good writing. It continues to circulate across the Internet. Here are the tips:

HOW TO WRITE GOOD
by Frank L. Visco

My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules:

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat.)
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren’t necessary.
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
10. One should never generalize.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
13. Don’t be redundant; don’t use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
14. Profanity sucks.
15. Be more or less specific.
16. Understatement is always best.
17. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice is to be avoided.
21. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
22. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
23. Who needs rhetorical questions?

A Northern Virginia woman watching the Arlington house for vacationing friends thought something was amiss.

She went into the home and found a scene straight out of a fraternity house. Beer bottles here. Beer cans there. Dried sticky beer all over tables and the floor. And ping pong balls … lots of ping pong balls.

Anyone for beer pong?

The home had been the site of a burglar beer pong tournament, which was bad. It got worse. Apparently the burglars needed a ride home. The woman looked into the garage and discovered both her friends’ cars were gone.

The local cops are on the case, reports the Washington Times, and they think it may have been teenagers who did it.

“You’re not going to find a 50-year-old couple doing something of this nature,” said a police spokesman.

We’ve celebrated Headlines of the Day on this site, the hedders that are clever or capture a story so well.

Anyone who has written the sterling headlines will have a number of clinkers in his or her clip file as well. The unfortunate thing is they are so public.

The theater shooting in Aurora, Colo., last week was terrifying and awful and incomprehensible. A former medical student killed 12 and injured many others at a screening of the new Batman movie.

A story on page one of today’s print issue went to press on Thursday night before the incident with this headline: “First shots fired in summary judgment battle.”

For the Friday Daily Alert we were able to change that to: “First salvos launched in summary judgment campaign.”

Others didn’t have that opportunity. In retrospect, the guys and gals at “Entertainment Weekly” magazine probably wish they had chosen a different head for their July 20 cover: “Batman’s Killer Finale.”

HOT SPRINGS—Members of the Virginia Bar Association made their way to the mountains this past weekend for the group’s summer meeting, the highlight of which was the Virginia senatorial debate between two ex-governors, Republican George Allen and Democrat Tim Kaine.

Temperatures in the mornings were in the 60s, a huge relief from the oven routine earlier this month. Some quick hits and observations, with the non-debate thoughts first:

Neck Propellers. I generally don’t write fashion articles, but my piece last month called “The Bow Tie Guys” was a big hit with the VBA crowd. For that story, I didn’t get a chance to interview two longtime bow tie guys, Hampton Circuit Judge Louis Lerner and Roanoke lawyer James Jennings, but both were in attendance and sporting their favorite neckwear.

Good Guy: John Epps. Richmond lawyer John Epps, a VBA past president, was given the Roger Groot Pro Bono Award for his work on the chief justice’s pro bono summit and the development of Capital One’s Justice Server, the online case-management system that helps the private bar handle pro bono cases. Professor Groot would be proud. Well done and well-earned.

Wrongful Convictions. Thomas Haynesworth spent 27 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, and he was at the meeting, serving on a panel on wrongful conviction. Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who was instrumental in getting him freed, was on the same panel, and he asked the VBA’s Special Issues committee for help in getting the statute on writs of actual innocence simplified. The statute is a mess, full of internal problems and in need of a reboot – Not to make it easier to get a writ, just to make it a process that courts and counsel both can understand. You’ll hear more on this in the future.

Fourteen’s the Charm. Fairfax Circuit Judge Jane Marum Roush has been giving her annual review of civil cases from the Supreme Court of Virginia for 14, count ’em, 14 years. The high court had been on a streak where the number of civil and criminal cases was more or less even, but this past year there was a huge tilt toward civil cases, by about four to one.

Home Sweet Homestead. Two lawyers from Virginia Beach have been bringing their children to The Homestead for meetings for a couple of years. The mom of the couple said that their son out of the blue asked, a bit wistfully, “Can we move to The Homestead?” Great idea, except for the paying for it. You could tell that kid to grab a green jacket and a luggage cart, but I don’t think that’s what he had in mind.

Kid-Friendly. Speaking of the wee ones, The Homestead is in the process of a makeover to make the resort more family-oriented and family-friendly. A grand Italian-like garden has been razed and they’re putting in a swimming pool. The 1766 Grille is getting a new look and new menu this winter (Homestead burgers? Dogs? French fries, anyone?) And someone said the resort is going to relax the requirement that men wear ties at dinner.

Now, the part about the Allen-Kaine debate:

Low Expectations? Post-debate comment was fairly unanimous. Kaine won on style, and even substance. But Allen was much better than expected. I saw these two knock heads last December, at a debate that was part of “AP Day at the Capitol.” My thought at the time was that Allen had spent his time in wilderness well, because he was indeed much more polished than I’d seen in prior debates or talks. He was better in December than he was this July.

Smashmouth? Kaine tweaked Allen for practicing “smashmouth” politics, dredging up Allen’s infamous promise to knock the Democrats’ “soft teeth down their whiny throats.” He also called up Allen barbs aimed at bureaucrats, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. Kaine’s point: Our politics needs to be better and at a higher plane. A worthy thought, but one wonders if you get there by recycling old insults and then saying you yourself are above that. Also, one wonders what Kaine would say about the Obama campaign’s smashmouth tactics, including the recent insinuation that Mitt Romney is somehow a felon.

A Strong Line of Attack. Back in December, I heard Kaine start a mantra that he has refined: Allen talks like a fiscal conservative but doesn’t govern like one. He lists numbers from Allen’s term as governor back in the 1990s and his Senate votes. Even some of the Republicans in the house thought Allen didn’t refute it very well.

Engage Before Speaking. Kaine tested a poke at Allen over the latter’s promise to introduce a “personhood” bill at a national level, one of a host of issues on the social conservative agenda. Allen, in response, said, “I’m not running on that, I’m running on jobs.” All the social conservatives who didn’t vote for him in the GOP primary likely will take note. After all, they don’t have to show up in November.

No Macaca. In December, Kaine sought to make hay over Allen’s infamous “macaca” gaffe, the caught-on-YouTube remark that allowed Jim Webb narrowly to beat Allen in 2006. The good news is that there was no macaca in sight at The Homestead, not even on the horse trails.

A School for Moderators. CNN’s Candy Crowley was the moderator of the debate, and if she gets the chance to moderate again, either here or elsewhere, she might familiarize herself with the rules in effect. The campaigns and VBA leaders and staffers sweat over the ground rules and the negotiations can be painstaking. Note to Crowley: The rules mean something…they can’t be ignored and laughed off.

Sign Wars. Yard signs sprout everywhere for these debates. Allen was on the ground (literally) early with bright red signs. There seemed to be more Kaine signs by the time it was over, and the Kaine people didn’t clean theirs up as quickly. The day after, you could still find the Kaine signs down Route 220 all the way to Covington.

WINTERGREEN–The chief judge of the Virginia Court of Appeals had a few words of advice for the men and women who mete out lawyer discipline.

Dishonest lawyers are a pox and should be gotten rid of.

But mistakes are easy to make and may be prompted by any number of reasons – family problems, age, money problems, substance abuse issues. For lawyers who fall into those categories, he said he hoped the bar would find a way to help that person get over and through the problem and get back to being a productive member of the profession.

Judge Walter Felton’s call for compassion came at the Virginia State Bar Disciplinary Conference July 13. The annual gathering brings together the VSB’s disciplinary staff with the volunteers, both lawyers and laypeople, who serve on the VSB Disciplinary and the bar’s regional disciplinary committees.

And some lawyers get in trouble because they take cases they have no business taking because of financial pressure. Felton expressed concern for newer lawyers.

“More and more young lawyers don’t have the ability to do what they’re trying to do,” he said. There is “no mentoring” for them, and with an overbearing debtload from their law school student loans and the need just to keep the lights on, they get into trouble.

Felton said he knows that those in the disciplinary system see these problems. But he and his colleagues on the appeals court see them as well.

The lack of mentoring shows up there in the poor behavior of lawyers who don’t know how to act – and this lack of civility and professionalism leads lawyers to hyperventilate and make ad hominem attacks against opposing counsel or the opposite party.

In an anecdote that showed steel beneath the judge’s typical courteous manner, Felton told how one lawyer in a support case attacked the opposing party, saying things such as “her only impairment is her indolence” and other denigrating comments.

The judge said the court put all that language in its opinion, along with its “tart ruling” against the lawyer who made those comments.

Then Felton sent the lawyer’s brief to the bar, citing the canon that requires a judge to report lawyer misconduct when he or she sees it.

Felton saluted the men and women who handle discipline of lawyers, noting that their work is important to a self-regulated profession.

And he asked them to be “discerning.”

Dishonest lawyers? “Remove them” from the profession.

Lawyers with problems? For those able to be rehabilitated, Felton called on the bar to “provide some system or direction on how to get deficiencies corrected.”

Be “firm but compassionate,” he asked.

The late great Andy Griffith passed away earlier this week.

Who knew that tucked away in an old episode of “The Andy Griffith Show,” there is a clip of Sheriff Andy Taylor giving his son Opie a lesson in attorney-client privilege?

Opie and a friend had bugged a conversation at the Mayberry jail and he pressed his paw with the tape, saying it was OK to use “if it helps the law.”

Ain’t true, Andy said. “Whether a man is guilty or innocent,” he told the boy, “we have to find that out by due process of law.”

Check it the clip at the Legal Ethics Forum blog.

http://www.legalethicsforum.com/blog/2012/07/sheriff-andy-taylor-on-taping-attorney-client-communications-1.html

(Photo by CBS via Getty Images)