Hello and welcome back to Gimbal’s Tip of the Week. It’s time for our monthly legal writing tip. Today, we’re talking about pruning puffery in your legal writing.

I’m Karen Dunn Skinner. I help lawyers like you build more profitable and productive practices…without spending more time in the office. My goal, as always, is to help you do more in less time and with less effort, whether it’s how you practice law, how you run your business, or how you write your emails.

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Why talk about writing on a practice improvement blog? Because as a lawyer, editor and practice management advisor, I know that poor writing is a huge source of wasted time and effort in our profession.

My last writing tip challenged you to reduce redundancy in your writing... Your new challenge is to cut out the puffery.

Merriam Webster defines puffery as “exaggerated commendation especially for promotional purposes” or “hype.” When it comes to legal writing, puffery is usually more about hype than commendation. It’s the grandiose wording we use to make our writing look more important, or worse, to hide a weak argument behind the dazzle of impressive vocabulary

Puffery often appears in introductory phrases. For example:

• At the present time…
• By virtue of the fact that…
• In the event that…

Your challenge: write more concisely by replacing your own puffed-up phrases with a single word. Here are a few to get you started:

• At the present time becomes now
• By virtue of the fact that becomes because
• In the event that becomes if

So that’s it for this week’s writing challenge. If you want more tips on improving your writing, don’t forget to grab my editing cheat sheet. It’s packed with information on editing your own work, so you never send out anything but your best.

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Thanks a lot everybody! See you next week.