Noting that Strunk and White's Elements of Style calls for writers to eschew unnecessary words, Alford decided to see how law journals fared at following this rule. Strunk and White's classic example of an unnecessary phrase is "the fact that," so Alford decided to survey how many times this phrase appeared in the top law reviews over the past ten years. The top ten (mis)users of this phrase were:
Harvard Law Review: 869Looks like Harvard just has to rank at the top of everything.
Michigan Law Review: 496
Yale Law Journal: 459
Columbia Law Review: 436
Chicago Law Review: 431
NYU Law Review: 428
Penn Law Review: 408
California Law Review: 406
Stanford Law Review: 388
Virginia Law Review: 364
(H/T: Paul Caron at TaxProf Blog)
No comments:
Post a Comment