Since 2018, the Cyberlaw Clinic has had an internal style guide, to ensure consistency across our publications and assist students’ development of strong legal writing skills. As we drafted it, we made frequent reference to other style guides, including the classics like Strunk & White, but also some that have been shared freely on the internet. Now that we’ve road-tested our style guide for a full academic year, we thought it was time to pay it forward, and we are making the fall 2019 version of the Cyberlaw Clinic Style Guide publicly available under a CC-BY 4.0 license (click the link to download a pdf copy).
The Cyberlaw Clinic Style Guide offers general tips for strong, clear, persuasive writing; advice on editing and proofreading; and the style rules we follow in producing both internal and public-facing work product. It also features special sections on drafting emails and writing for courts, and appendices that give step-by-step instructions for checking defined terms and running redlines.
We hope this document will be useful to other clinics, law students, legal practitioners, and anyone else with an interest in the topic of professional writing. We are especially pleased to release it under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY 4.0), in hopes that others will adapt and remix it for their own purposes. If you have feedback or questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
