English Grammar, Punctuation, and Spelling
What the exam tests
Control of Standard English under time pressure: agreement, pronoun case, modifiers, punctuation in quotations, and spelling of legal terms.
Rules that appear often
- Collective nouns take singular verbs when acting as one body: "The jury has reached a verdict"; "The court is in session." Use plural when members act individually: "The jury were divided."
- Who/whom: substitute he/him. "Whom did you call?" (I called him.) "Who called?" (He called.)
- Restrictive clauses take no commas and usually "that"; nonrestrictive clauses take commas and "which." "The exhibit that was marked is missing" identifies; "Exhibit 4, which was marked, is missing" adds information.
- Serial comma: "redirect, recross, and rebuttal." Use semicolons between series items that contain commas.
- Quotation marks: commas and periods go inside; question marks depend on whether the quoted material or the whole sentence is a question. Do not add punctuation inside a parenthetical unless it is a complete sentence.
- Possessives: singular "witness's memory"; plural "witnesses' memories"; names ending in s usually take 's in legal style ("Jones's").
- Spelling: judgment, acknowledgment, admissible, privilege, waiver/waived, occurrence, defendant, voir dire, subpoena, affidavit.
Worked example
"The witness said that she had not seen the exhibit, which was marked as Exhibit 4." The clause "which was marked" is nonrestrictive, extra information, so the comma is correct. If the point is to identify which exhibit, write "the exhibit that was marked as Exhibit 4" with no comma.
Traps
Comma splices; subject-verb disagreement after "each," "either," or "none"; apostrophe errors in plurals ("witnesses," not "witnesses'"); and capitalizing "court" generically.