Legal and Medical Terminology, Spelling, Punctuation, and Grammar
Legal vocabulary
- Latin and Law French persist: voir dire, res ipsa loquitur, mens rea, actus reus, habeas corpus, prima facie, sua sponte, ex parte, de novo, nunc pro tunc, quantum meruit.
- Precision pairs: assault/battery, larceny/robbery, libel/slander, liable/libel, plaintiff/petitioner, judgment (U.S. spelling).
- Kentucky forms: KRS, KRE, CR, RCr, Ky., plus county names that defeat spell-check - Fayette, McCracken, Bourbon, McCreary, Calloway, Hardin, Floyd - and cities such as Paducah, Frankfort, Covington, Elizabethtown, Bowling Green.
Medical vocabulary
- Findings and systems: myocardial infarction, hypertension, tachycardia, edema, radiculopathy, cervical (neck) versus cervical (cervix) by context, lumbar, cranial.
- Sound-alikes: diazepam/diltiazem, hydrocodone/oxycodone, prednisone/prednisolone. Verify with counsel and mark (phonetic) rather than guessing a drug or dosage.
- Dosages are the highest-risk item on the page: "15 mg" and "50 mg" are different facts.
Mechanics
- Serial comma; compound modifiers hyphenated before the noun; quotation marks with periods and commas inside; em dashes for interruption; ellipses for trailing off; brackets for editorial insertions.
- Spell out one through nine and any number beginning a sentence; use numerals for 10 and above, money, measurements, and dates.
Worked example
The witness says, "Doctor Reyes saw me in the E.R. on March third, two thousand nineteen." Under a consistent style sheet: "Dr. Reyes saw me in the ER on March 3, 2019." Titles are abbreviated, dates and years take numerals, and the style sheet - not personal preference - controls the result.
Traps
Autocorrect turning "counsel" into "council"; swapping plaintiff and defendant inside a jury instruction; misspelling witness and provider names; hyphenating established terms of art such as "substantial factor."