You are posting a comment about...
legal writing and points of style
The
Chicago Manual of Style accepts questions regarding the Manual and responds in a
monthly Q&A section. I saw two questions t
his month that may be of interest to legal writers.
First, a question about bullets:
Q. In a list of bulleted points where some are complete sentences and some are not, do you put a period at the end of a sentence, but not the list, or periods after all bulleted points, or none at all?
A. I’m afraid you won’t like my answer: this situation is not covered in CMOS because in a list of bulleted points all the items should be styled with the same syntax, either sentences or sentence fragments.
Second, a question that highlights the point that, if proper construction of a sentence is awkward, you should just re-write it:
Q. When you use parentheses to indicate that a noun might be plural, is it necessary to use them to indicate that the verb might be plural as well? For example, The participant(s) was (were) informed of the procedure in writing. Is there a rule about this, or is it a stylistic choice? Am I justified in adding the second verb to an author’s manuscript?
A. I don’t know about a rule, but the construction is clumsy, and it’s better to avoid it. Just write “Participants were informed of the procedure in writing,” which doesn’t rule out the possibility of there being only one participant.
