I get caught up in the details of sentence-level writing a lot. I sometimes lose track of the bigger picture. For example, I get wound up because a brief writer doesn't use hyphens for phrasal adjectives or uses moreover, furthermore, and additionally (heavy connectors) too much and so on. Meanwhile a colleague points out that the writer has misstated the standard of review, and I missed it.  That's me.

But though lawyers can never stop worrying about content, my obsession with the fine points was validated--in my own mind--when I read this today:

“So it is with writing: clarity does not come in one or two strokes, but through the cumulative effect of many improvements, some of them larger and some smaller.”

Joseph Kimble, Lifting the Fog of Legalese 136 (Carolina Academic Press 2006).