Bryan A. Garner

The New York Times called him "a silver-penned legal-writing specialist" and "the persnickety stylist for a linguistically challenged profession." The acclaimed novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace has repeatedly written that "Bryan Garner is a genius." And the Green Bag has added, "he teaches a mean seminar."

Garner has been fascinated with words since childhood. When he was 16, he picked up his first usage dictionary, Eric Partridge's Usage and Abusage - "Never had I held a more exciting book." By 18 he had absorbed Fowler and every other modern usage authority. In college he studied linguistics and the English classics at the University of Texas and Oxford.

In his first week of law school at UT - a time when most One-L's forget about eating or sleeping, let alone new hobbies - Garner heard words being used in ways he hadn't heard before. He began collecting notes on legal usage and gradually built up a wealth of tips. He started writing A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage while still in law school (and doubly busy as an associate editor of Texas Law Review).

Garner clerked for Judge Thomas M. Reavley of the Fifth Circuit, then practiced at a major firm in Dallas. He soon began teaching, first at his alma mater and now at Southern Methodist University School of Law.

Editor in chief of Black's Law Dictionary since its seventh edition, Garner has remained a prolific author. His works include The Elements of Legal Style, The Winning Brief, The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style, Legal Writing in Plain English, Securities Disclosure in Plain English, and many other books and articles. In 2003, The Chicago Manual of Style incorporated his restatement of English grammar into its 15th edition.

He tackles many hands-on projects. A member of the American Law Institute since 1992, he served as lead reviser on its committee on bylaws and council rules. From 1992 to 1999, he helped restyle federal rules for the U.S. Judicial Conference's Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure. He has done the same for courts in other states as well, including California and Texas. The Association of Reporters of Judicial Decisions recognized his contributions to judicial writing in 1994 with the prestigious Henry C. Lind Award, and in 2005 the Plain Language Institute presented him its Lifetime Achievement Award. But perhaps his toughest drafting challenge was sorting out that tangle of British and American laws governing his favorite sport. The result was published in 2004 - The Rules of Golf in Plain English.

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