Conclusion

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163

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chapter five

Conclusion

A. DON’T BE SMART

A nal piece of advice. Lawyers are experts, and that expertise is

hard-won. Don’t aunt it, though — a point that was made in a

good article in the Harvard Business Review.1

There are two risks in pitching things at too high a level. The

rst is that you alienate your audience by a show-oy display of

technical information they neither understand nor care about (for

example, the dierence between therefor and therefore). You want to

avoid being preachy.

The other risk is that you may have ventured into territory

which you don’t know well, and have got it wrong. Some clever

reader is bound to catch you out. A thin veneer tends to chip o

easily.

I have probably gone both ways in my time, but I hope not in

these pages.

1 Liane Davey, “Stop Trying to Sound Smart When You’re Writing” (5

October 2015), Harvard Business Review, online: https://hbr.org/2016/10/

stop-trying-to-sound-smart-when-youre-writing.