Ward on Words

On Sept. 15, 2025, Trump filed a $ 15 billion defamation lawsuit against the New York Times and other parties. The pleading runs 84 pages. On Sept. 19, 2025, Judge Steven D. Merryday, appointed by President George H.W. Bush, issued a four-page ruling ripping Trump's pleading to shreds . (It's short, to the point, and definitely worth the read.)  The ruling allows Trump's team to refile within 28 days and requires that the new pleading cannot exceed 40 pages. In his spare, four-page ruling, Judge Merryday provides multiple lessons in writing that all of us could benefit from following, lessons that I would like to share here: Lesson 1) Cogently present the issue: "In this action, a prominent American citizen (perhaps the most prominent American citizen) alleges defamation by a prominent American newspaper publisher American newspaper publisher (perhaps the most prominent American newspaper publisher) and by several other  corporate and natural persons.   ..." Les...

Earlier this year, Bill Keller, former executive editor of the New York Times, was not happy with the reception given to h is wife's story in the Guardian about a cancer patient. Emma Keller's story looked at the "ethics of tweeting a terminal illness" and focused attention on Lisa Bonchek Adams, a woman tweeting and blogging about living with Stage IV breast cancer. Emma's post was so polarizing that the Guardian took it down (here's a cached version .) A couple days after Emma Keller published her story about Lisa Bonchek Adams, Bill Keller wrote a piece about Adams as well. It was called " Heroic Measures " and it essentially called on Lisa Adams to shut up and die already. Here's how he opened the essay: LISA BONCHEK ADAMS has spent the last seven years in a fierce and very public cage fight with death. Since a mammogram detected the first toxic seeds of cancer in her left breast when she was 37, she has blogged and tweeted copiously abo...