Question: Why don't lawyers hyphenate phrasal adjectives?
A commenter asks:
Wayne Schiess
Director of Legal Writing | The University of Texas School of Law | Website | Seminars | Articles | Books: Preparing Legal Documents Nonlawyers Can Read and Understand | Better Legal Writing | Writing for the Legal Audience | The Legal Memo: A Basic Guide
- Why don't legal writers use the hyphen [for phrasal adjectives]? I would say 90% of legal writers do not use it.
- Most people, lawyers included, get too little writing training in high school, college, and law school. If I had received strong, intense writing training in high school and college, I might have known about the phrasal-adjective hyphen sooner.
- Lawyers are not good at consulting writing sources. There are many style guides out there, and there are even several legal-writing guides out there. All the style guides, legal and nonlegal, tell you to hyphenate phrasal adjectives. But too few lawyers have them and consult them.
- This raises the question why. Why do we not consult writing sources enough. We're too busy? We're ignorant of our own writing deficiencies? We're overconfident about our writing knowledge? Yes.
Wayne Schiess
Director of Legal Writing | The University of Texas School of Law | Website | Seminars | Articles | Books: Preparing Legal Documents Nonlawyers Can Read and Understand | Better Legal Writing | Writing for the Legal Audience | The Legal Memo: A Basic Guide
When I learned about the hyphenation rule for phrasal adjectives a few years ago, I was shocked by this gap in my knowledge of mechanics, which I thought I thoroughly grasped. I had no reluctance to consult style books but had no occasion to look it up. I'd guess others' ignorance of this practice has the same explanation as mine: grammar and mechanics is a high school English topic, but high school students aren't taught to hyphenate phrasal adjectives. (Because the teachers don't know the rule?)
Although I don't recall authorities who disagree, I think some may advocate varying practices. I've seen debates on phrasal adjectives in law forums. Some knowledgeable participants omitted the hypen except when its absence causes confusion.
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Lawyers don't consult style books (or at least not as often as they should) because they already are overwhelmed by the Blue Book (and all its competitors)for legal citations, and are terrified that style books would be (1) just as confusing and (2) not required by courts.
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I have two reasons:
1. ignorance
2. no penalty for getting it wrong.
With respect to #2, most people (judges and attorneys included) are not going to notice a person's failure to hyphenate a particular phrase, and, thus, there is no penalty for not hyphenating a phrase. However, they might get weird looks if they incorrectly use a hyphen.
Wayne says:
As to your number 2: good point. No penalty, or a penalty so small as to be insignificant.
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Wayne: Do you think the State Department wrote this phrasal adjective correctly in the Federal Register?
"two-year foreign residence (home country physical presence) requirement"
For your reference, here's the entire sentence:
"Any alien who as a national or resident of one of those countries and obtained an exchange visitor visa and/or became a participant in an Exchange Visitor Program involving a designated field of specialized knowledge or skill after the effective date of those public notices was subject to the two-year foreign residence (home country physical presence) requirement of Section 212(e) of the Immigration and Nationality Act as provided by said section and 22 CFR 41.63."
Wayne says:
two-year, foreign-residence (home-country-physical-presence) requirement
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Another possibility is that lawyers (or their secretaries) might not know how to turn off that darned auto-em-dash function that sometimes occurs when you enter a hyphen. (I just figured it out myself.)
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A lot of lawyers I know are perfectly aware of the "rules" for hyphen usage - they just don't like them. I think hyphens for phrasal adjectives are generally becoming less common than they once were, which I think is a shame - they do not always add to elegance ("home-country-physical-presence" being a good example), but they do add to clarity.
It's happening to other hyphens too - particularly strikingly, in my view, in the increasing use of the spelling "cooperation".
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I have a kooky theory that it's the dad-gum monotype Courier font that's responsible for all of the dash-unhappiness. Courier collapses a double-dash into a single dash. Consequently, em-dashes, en-dashes and hyphens are all represented by the same character. As a result, even textbook authors don't seem to understand how to use an em-dash. Maybe collapsing three different dashes into one has made it unnecessarily difficult to learn.
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