Recent literature on writing style in US Supreme Court opinions has focused on style as a means of furthering justices’ policy goals. In particular, an opinion’s clarity is proposed to make the implementation of the announced policy more likely. We give a formal argument that the observed distribution of opinion clarity is not easily reconcilable with justices who are striving to write clearly in service of policy implementation-related goals; this is true even if there are case-level costs that sometimes make writing clearly more difficult. We propose that justices having aesthetic preferences – essentially, stylistic preferences over opinion language that are unrelated to policy implementation – that they weight heavily could explain the observed distribution of opinion clarity. Our analysis of some 4,500 majority opinions 1955–2008 is largely consistent with our theoretical argument.

Based on an analysis of all administrative court cases published in the Netherlands in 2020 (N = 4,642), we tested the hypothesis that experienced law clerks write judgments with greater confidence than less experienced clerks. A confidently written judgment was defined as being shorter, less standardized, and containing fewer legal references than a less confidently written judgment. In support of this hypothesis, our results showed that law clerks with more experience co-signed judgments that were less standardized and contained fewer legal references. However, contrary to the confidence hypothesis, we established that these judgments were also longer than judgments co-signed by less experienced clerks. Our study contextualizes the concerns expressed in studies on the US Supreme Court about the delegation of drafting duties to inexperienced law clerks. The study challenges the assumption that delegation of drafting duties to law clerks automatically results in judgments with a less confident writing style, due to the clerks’ inexperience. The assumption may hold for the US Supreme Court, where all law clerks are relatively inexperienced. However, the assumption does not hold in jurisdictions in which law clerks can be just as experienced (in terms of years worked in the legal field) as judges. This conclusion suggests that research on the functioning of the US Supreme Court cannot necessarily be generalized to other jurisdictions.

A longstanding debate in American judicial politics concerns whether the US Supreme Court anticipates or responds to the possibility that Congress will override its decisions. A recent theory proposes that opinions that are relatively hard to read are more costly for Congress to review, and that as a result, the Court can decrease the likelihood of override from a hostile Congress by obfuscating its opinions (i.e., writing opinions that are less readable when congressional review is a threat). I derive a straightforward but novel empirical implication of this theory; I then show that the implication does not in fact hold. This casts serious doubt on the claim that justices strategically obfuscate opinion language to avoid congressional override. I also discuss sentence tokenization as a source of measurement error in readability statistics for judicial opinions.

Objectives: Agraphia is the loss or impairment of the ability to produce written language as a consequence of brain damage and is a well recognised feature of dementia. However there is no generally accepted classification of agraphic disorders. Our aim was to determine the influence of writing style, lettercase and sentence polarity of the writing component of Folstein's MMSE on the overall test score.

Methods: We retrospectively reviewed the ‘write a sentence’ request of Folstein's MMSE of 280 randomly selected patients attending a geriatric day hospital. We analysed four sentence characteristics: 1 Number of words, 2 Writing legibility, 3 Sentence polarity, 4 Letter case.

Results: 280 MMSE forms were examined, 165 were from female patients. Mean age was 81.7(± 6.6) years. Mean MMSE score was 21.6 (males: 21.9, females: 21.4). Significant correlation was detected between the overall MMSE score and both legibility and number of words. Legibility scores were significantly higher for females than for males (7.2 vs. 6.6, p < 0.03). The mean MMSE of females writing in lowercase was significantly higher than for those writing in uppercase (21.5 vs. 18.6, p < 0.05). The mean MMSE score of subjects writing sentences with a positive tone was significantly higher than that of those writing a neutral or negative sentence (22.6 vs. 21.0 p < 0.03).

Conclusions: We have demonstrated a relationship between the content and structure of the writing assessment aspect of the MMSE and the overall test score.

The principal reason to conduct medical research is twofold: 1) to provide an answer to some question that is important to the investigator(s); and 2) to affect the behavior of others involved in the practice of medicine. In order to accomplish the latter of these two objectives, the results of your labors must be published in a reputable medical Journal so that it can impact upon the practice of your peers. To accomplish this, it is necessary to conform to certain rules in the development of the manuscript, and then have the paper evaluated for its relative merits for publication by a panel of your peers. These issues are addressed in this paper.

We all tend to be somewhat naive about the need to write in terms that can be understood and appreciated by our peers. Without clarity and understanding, our work has little impact on others. All that will be accomplished is the knowledge that you think you have gained from what you have done. There are several benefits associated with submission of your hard-earned work for review by your peers. Perhaps the most significant is that the process of peer review constitutes a learning process for the reviewers as well as the authors.