Like some of the other bloggers, I am interpreting this month’s question a little loosely. I don’t have a favorite law novel or film. Instead, I am going to recommend a book of law-related short stories, The Legal Fiction of Lowell B. Komie, and then talk a little about poetry by lawyers.
Over at Language Log, they’ve been talking about one of my favorite articles about writing, Joseph Williams’ The Phenomenology of Error. If you think of yourself as a grammar expert but have never read Williams’ article, you should, and be sure you read it all the way through, to the end.
Update January 12, 2009: Just now I caught, and fixed, the misspelling of “phenomenology” I had inadvertently included in this post. How ironic, given Williams’ subject matter, that I did so, inadvertently, and that Dean Strang noticed (see the comments).
Michael Sheehan at Wordmall has posted a very clear and helpful explanation of the conventions regarding use of colons and semicolons in English. These punctuation marks cause so many difficulties in my students’ writing. Probably the only mark that causes more trouble is the comma.