The humble comma seems to baffle many. Space doesn’t permit full discussion of the subject (you may be relieved to hear), but here are some pointers.

Pauses
If you’ve ever read a contract or a will drafted by an English solicitor, you’ll have noticed the complete lack of commas (omitted because they can be the source of ambiguity or error, as the cases attest*). Read that English document aloud, and you’ll be left breathless: no pauses.

The basic rule is that a comma should be inserted wherever there is a natural pause for the reader. Don’t overdo it, though: too …

Today’s tip is courtesy of Melanie Bueckert, legal researcher extraordinaire at the Manitoba Court of Appeal via Brian Roach, articling student at Tapper Cuddy LLP.

The Research Log (well deserving of its capitalization) is a deceptively simple template that forces the legal researcher to document all sources consulted and note what about that source was of importance. You can also include anything that wasn’t important so you know not to review it again. If used properly, your research memo practically writes itself. I can vouch for its usefulness – the …

Not things you did as a teenager that you’d rather forget about, but past tenses of verbs that continue to cause people trouble.

Dive
The past tense of this verb is not dove. That’s a bird, mispronounced. The past tense is dived (or should be – the Yanks differ on this one).

Lay and lie
A confusing pair. From last time:

Lead
As in lead me astray. The past tense (and past participle) is led. Similarly, mislead and misled.

Confusion may arise because these two don’t follow the same pattern as read, which is the …

I was asked what the library equivalent was of our help desk’s standard “try turning it off and back on” advice. I’m not sure there’s an equivalent, but “try a different browser” comes close.

A not infrequent problem is that certain sites and databases don’t display properly (or sometimes at all) on a given browser. If you find that a web page or online document isn’t displaying properly and you can’t figure why, try looking at it with a different browser.  Some vendors design their databases to work with a specific browser. (In one case, I was assured by a …

More words you may be mixing up.

Next time: problematic pasts.

-Neil Guthrie (@guthrieneil)…

Administrator’s note: thanks to Natalie Wing, Law Librarian at Yukon Public Law Library, for this guest tip!

WARNING: this post may contain disturbing content for those with deep anti-marking-up-of-library-book sensitivities.

Back in ye olden days, law clerks and law librarians used to write in the margins of case reporters, literally “noting up” the pages with citations for subsequent appellate decisions. Indeed, it would seem that librarians both sanctioned and participated in the marking up of library books, but of course only for very specific purposes, and conceivably only with the tidiest of (and most tidily placed) writing. Here is an …

Words you mix up at your peril.

Next week: confusing pairs, part 2

–Neil Guthrie (@guthrieneil)…

Good keyword searching practice varies from database to database, depending on how the data is structured and how the search engine works. But there are some principles that apply to most situations.

For legal research, whenever you have at least a basic understanding of the legal concepts involved, it is usually best to start out casting your net wide, and refine or expand as you go. The goal, for this strategy, is to create a search that will include ALL relevant documents and as few irrelevant ones as possible.

The following process involves an imagined scenario in which I am …

A frequently asked question is “what does this word mean in a legal context?” In my last SLAW tip, I talked about using legislation to find definitions, in particular interpretation acts. However, legislation cannot define every term used, so if you can’t find your term in the legislation, you may want to check if it has been judicially defined. There are a number of books of words and phrases listing judicial definitions (and truly it is a wonder what has been defined), but, as with legislation, these books cannot be exhaustive.

If you can’t find your term in either …

Next: confusing pairs, part 1

–Neil Guthrie (@guthrieneil)…