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"Indispensable to international students studying U.S. law, Culture to Culture explains the U.S. legal system's rhetorical preferences, linguistic specializations, and current conventions. Readers will be able to learn comfortably and quickly what U.S. audiences expect. The book provides students with U.S. legal tools for reading texts, analyzing problems, researching sources, organizing analytical patterns, and writing in acceptable legal styles. Covering a broad range of topics and questions, it introduces current conventions through a variety of legal texts, including letters, memos, transactional documents, briefs, exams, and scholarly papers. Culture to Culture will prepare international lawyers to be researchers and writers in both U.S. law schools and U.S. legal practices, or to return to their own countries with an analytical perspective on how U.S. lawyers research, analyze, negotiate, and write."--BOOK JACKET.

"Designed as a desktop reference for legal writers, the fourth edition of this book adds new entries and updates current entries, provides reference material and guidance on improving one's legal writing, includes a large index with cross-references under each entry, and addresses common questions legal writers have. Covering issues small and large, it offers quick, reliable answers."--Publisher's website.

A-to-Z entries answer the kinds of logistical questions that come up during legal writing--from the proper uses of commas to identifying the writing priorities for complaints. Entries also address general issues of style, such as the overuse of flowery language and jargon. And the reference even provides advice on handling emotionally sticky topics in entries such as "bad news, giving it" and "bad news, softening it." The authors are teachers of law and writing at the U. of Wisconsin and Georgetown U. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

By coordinating form and function, structure and style, you can create harmonious, unified documents that are accurate and elegant. Just as architects design buildings to meet specific purposes and cater to their clients' needs, so lawyers design documents. You can design as architects do: by interviewing clients, understanding the products they have in mind, and designing documents accordingly. This book uses architecture as a visual guide to the legal writer's daily questions: How big should it be? Who is going to use it? What do they want? Who takes priority? How many sections? How are they connected?