Over the years, I’ve written plenty about the practice of expressing numbers using both words and digits, as in five (5) days’ notice. In MSCD, I recommend using words for one through ten and digits for 11 and up (with some obvious exceptions). I also discuss using only digits. (Go here for an extract of
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More Public “Drafting Clearer Contracts” Training
By Ken Adams
Now that all my scheduled public Drafting Clearer Contracts training has wrapped up, I’ve been asked politely when I’m going to get my act together and schedule more training. Well, that time is now! Here’s what I’ve just scheduled: For more information, and to register, go here. I wouldn’t get to keep doing this training…
Glenn West’s New Article on the Meaning of “Material”
By Ken Adams
I belatedly noticed that Glenn West has written another Business Law Today article. This one is entitled On the Meaning of “Material”. In it, he cites my 2023 law review article The Word Material Is Ambiguous in Contracts, Why That’s a Problem, and How to Fix It. It’s nice that someone noticed it! 🙂 Here…
“Gym Bag”: An Instance of Not Being Sufficiently Specific
By Ken Adams
When I try to make sense of a big new topic, usually I ask myself, What’s the taxonomy? What’s a sensible way to divide the pie? That’s what I did with the sources of uncertain meaning in contract language. A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting contains my most up-to-date take on that taxonomy, but…
Notes from the Road: Helsinki, Again
By Ken Adams
On the Road Again Last week I traveled to Helsinki to do a Drafting Clearer Contracts presentation for a Finnish company. This was my first in-person presentation outside the United States since late 2019, when I did a memorable presentation in Seoul that I describe in this blog post. That was the culmination of several…
Throat-Clearing: It’s More than Verbs
By Ken Adams
Gaining control over your contract verb structures requires that you be familiar with “throat-clearing.” What’s throat-clearing? It’s when a drafter sticks a redundant verb structure at the beginning of a sentence. As my gift to you, here’s part of the MSCD section on throat-clearing. The reason for this post is that recently I realized you…
Letting Number-Related Concepts—and Numbers!—Speak for Themselves
By Ken Adams
You can state numbers as numbers: We ate 25 pizzas! Or you can make numbers do specialized work by grafting on to them a symbol (or, if you insist, a word) so you can state an amount of money: The pizzas cost us $536! Or to the same effect, you can state a percentage: Laquana…
In Contracts, It’s Best to Practice Good Semantics Hygiene
By Ken Adams
Somehow, I now find myself articulating for the first time concepts I’ve relied on since forever. Today’s concept is “semantics hygiene”. That’s my term for getting in the habit of expressing yourself clearly in contracts, even if in a given context little or nothing is at stake. The term “semantics hygiene” is brand new. I…
Comparing Three Ways to Express a Condition
By Ken Adams
I’ve been presented with a choice between three alternative versions of a boilerplate provision. They’re shown in the image above. Using my categories-of-contract-language lingo, the first version uses language of obligation to express a condition. The second expresses a condition by using a conditional clause; because it uses the subordinator “if”, it focuses on the…
What’s Semantic Acuity, and How Can I Get Some?
By Ken Adams
You cannot be an informed consumer (or producer) of contract language without consulting A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. (See this 2024 blog post.) So doesn’t it follow that to be an informed consumer of contract language, all that’s required is that you get yourself of copy of MSCD? Well, no. For one thing, you…