Style, Language, Length — Best Practices

A civil judgment is not an essay graded for vocabulary; it is a working document that must explain to the losing party why she lost, satisfy the winning party that she won on the merits, and equip an appellate court to test the reasoning without re-reading the whole record. Style, language and length are therefore not cosmetic — they are functional. The Supreme Court has set aside High Court judgments simply because they could not be understood, and has repeatedly reminded judges that brevity is a virtue and that reasons are the lifeblood of a decision. This chapter distils the law and the best practices on how to write — clearly, simply, and no longer than the case demands. It builds on the structure of a civil judgment and the statutory basis covered earlier in this series. For the full map of the subject, see the Civil Judgment Writing hub.

Why style, language and length are part of the law, not decoration

Indian procedural law treats the manner of a judgment as a substantive obligation, not a matter of taste. Order XX Rule 4(2) of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 requires that every judgment of a court other than a Court of Small Causes "shall contain a concise statement of the case, the points for determination, the decision thereon, and the reasons for such decision." Two of those four words — concise and reasons — speak directly to style and length. A judgment that is bloated, opaque or unreasoned does not merely read badly; it fails the statutory test. The provision is deliberately economical in its own drafting, and it sets the standard it expects the judgment to meet: say what the case is, identify what has to be decided, decide it, and explain why — nothing more is mandated, and nothing less will do.

The Supreme Court crystallised the modern view in Shakuntala Shukla v. State of Uttar Pradesh (2021), where, pained by an unintelligible High Court order, it observed that "writing a judgment is an art, though it involves skilful application of law and logic." The Court explained that what a court says, and the manner in which it says it, is as important as what it decides; a decision must provide logical reasoning and must be comprehensible. It went on to set out the elements of a judgment — caption, case number, facts, issues, the rival contentions, the application of law, and the final verdict — and to recall the four purposes a written judgment serves: to discipline the judge's own thinking, to explain the decision to the parties, to communicate the reasons to the public, and to furnish reasons for the appellate court. Style and length, on this view, are the medium through which the rule of law is actually delivered to the litigant.

This is why poorly written judgments are not just criticised — they are reversed. The duty to write clearly and proportionately is enforceable, and an aspirant in the examination hall is being tested on exactly this discipline: can you say what is necessary, accurately, and stop? A judgment is, in the end, the only part of the judicial process that survives the hearing; the oral submissions fade, the demeanour of witnesses is forgotten, and what remains on the record is the written word. That word must therefore carry the entire weight of the decision, intelligibly, to readers who were never in the courtroom.

Plain language over ornament: the comprehensibility rule

The single most important rule of judicial style is comprehensibility. A judgment exists to be understood by the people it binds — and most litigants are not lawyers. The Supreme Court has been blunt about this. In a series of cases arising from the High Court of Himachal Pradesh, the Court set aside judgments it described as "utterly incomprehensible." In 2017, a Bench of Justices Madan Lokur and Deepak Gupta returned a judgment because the convoluted English made the reasoning impossible to discern, holding that the reasoning for the conclusion simply could not be deciphered from the text; in 2022, a Bench led by Justice K.M. Joseph famously asked of another order from the same court, "Is this in Latin? We may have to send it back to the High Court for it to be re-written." These were not isolated jibes — they reflect a settled position that a judgment which cannot be understood has not discharged the judicial function at all, because an unreadable judgment is, in law, an unreasoned one.

The lesson is that elaborate vocabulary, tangled syntax and Latin flourishes are not signs of learning — they are failures of communication. Prefer the short, ordinary word to the long, learned one: "use" rather than "utilise," "about" rather than "with regard to," "because" rather than "by reason of the fact that." Prefer the active voice ("the plaintiff proved delivery") to the passive ("it was by the plaintiff established that delivery had been effected"). Keep sentences to a single idea; a sentence that needs to be read twice to be parsed should be split into two. Resist the long subordinate clause that defers the verb to the far end of a paragraph, because it forces the reader to hold the entire sentence in suspense before learning what it asserts.

As Shakuntala Shukla stressed, a judgment should be capable of being understood not only by lawyers but by the affected citizen. This is not a counsel of dumbing-down. Legal precision and plain expression are allies, not rivals: the clearest way to state a precise proposition is almost always the simplest way. Where a technical term is unavoidable — "subrogation," "part performance," "res judicata" — use it, but make its operation plain from the surrounding sentences. Clarity is the discipline that survives appeal; ornament is the affectation that invites remand.

Reasons are the soul of the judgment

No amount of polished prose can rescue a judgment that does not give reasons. The leading authority is Kranti Associates (P) Ltd. v. Masood Ahmed Khan, (2010) 9 SCC 496, where the Supreme Court distilled the law on the duty to record reasons into a now-famous set of principles. Reasons, the Court held, are the link between the materials placed before the court and its conclusions; they introduce clarity, minimise the chances of arbitrariness, and satisfy the principle that justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done. An order that merely affirms a lower forum "without reasons" cannot stand.

For the trial judge this means that a finding on each issue must be supported by a stated chain of reasoning — why this witness was believed, why that document was disbelieved, why the burden was or was not discharged. Style serves substance here: the cleaner the prose, the more visible the reasoning. A reasoned finding buried in a thicket of irrelevant recital is, for practical purposes, no reasoning at all. When you write your statement of the plaintiff's case and the corresponding analysis, the test is always: has the reader been told why?

Brevity is a virtue — but not at the cost of reasons

Length is the most common failing in modern judgments, and the higher judiciary has lost patience with it. The Supreme Court has repeatedly reminded courts that "brevity is a virtue," once pointedly observing that a High Court had taken sixty pages to do what a fraction of that would have achieved. A long judgment is not a strong judgment; it is usually a judgment in which the writer has not decided what matters.

The path to brevity is selection, not omission. Include everything that is necessary to the decision — the pleadings reduced to issues, the evidence relevant to those issues, the law that governs them, and the reasoned findings. Exclude everything else: the verbatim reproduction of depositions, the block-quoting of every cited authority, the narration of procedural history that affects nothing. The discipline is to ask of every paragraph, "If I delete this, does the decision change or become harder to follow?" If not, cut it. Brevity and reasoning are not in tension; a judgment can be both short and fully reasoned, because reasoning is concentrated, not bulky. What brevity must never sacrifice is the statutory minimum under Order XX Rule 4 — the points, the decision, and the reasons.

It helps to distinguish two kinds of length. There is length that carries reasoning — additional pages because the case genuinely has more issues, more evidence, or a harder question of law — and there is length that carries only padding. The first is justified by the case; the second is never justified. A commercial suit with twelve issues and a thousand documents will properly yield a longer judgment than a simple suit for recovery, and no virtue attaches to compressing the former into the same span as the latter. The vice the courts condemn is not length as such but disproportionate length: pages that grow not because the case demands them but because the writer has not exercised selection. The test, therefore, is always proportionality to the actual difficulty of the case, not an arbitrary page ceiling.

The discipline of citation: avoid verbatim block-quoting

One of the principal causes of judicial bloat is the wholesale reproduction of precedent. With electronic databases, it has become effortless to paste pages of a cited authority into a judgment, but ease of copying is not a reason to copy. The better practice — long associated with the finest judgment-writers — is to state the ratio of a precedent in your own words in a sentence or two, give the citation, and apply it to the facts before you. A reader needs to know what the precedent decided and why it governs the present case; she does not need the citing court's headnote pasted in full.

Verbatim quoting also carries a substantive danger: it tempts the judge to adopt the language of another case without confirming that its facts and ratio actually apply. The aspirant should therefore cite precisely (correct party names, correct neutral or SCC citation) but sparingly, and should always pause on the citation to show the application. Demonstrating that you can compress a holding into a working sentence is exactly the skill the examiner is looking for, and it is the skill that keeps a judgment within proportionate length.

Reproducing pleadings and evidence: summarise, do not transcribe

If block-quoting precedent is one engine of bloat, the verbatim reproduction of pleadings and evidence is the other. Many judgments open with several pages copying the plaint and written statement word for word, then copy the examination-in-chief and cross-examination of each witness in full, before any analysis begins. This is the opposite of the "concise statement of the case" that Order XX Rule 4 demands. The reader does not need the pleadings transcribed; she needs them reduced to the contested propositions that the issues frame. The art lies in compression: a paragraph that distils the plaintiff's case to its essentials does more work than ten pages of reproduced averments.

The same applies to evidence. A judgment must show that the relevant evidence was considered and must give reasons for accepting or rejecting it — but "considered" does not mean "reproduced." Identify the witness, state in a sentence what that witness deposed on the point at issue, and then record whether and why the testimony is accepted. Quote a line of testimony only where the exact words are decisive — for instance, an admission in cross-examination that resolves an issue. Where a document is pivotal, quote the operative clause, not the entire instrument. This selective approach keeps the judgment within proportionate length while demonstrating, far more persuasively than bulk reproduction, that the court actually engaged with the material. When you draft the statement of the defendant's case, the discipline is identical: reduce the defence to the propositions it actually puts in issue.

There is a deeper reason to summarise rather than transcribe. The act of compressing evidence into a working sentence is itself an act of analysis — it forces the writer to decide what each piece of evidence is for. A judgment that merely pastes the record has postponed that analysis; a judgment that summarises has already begun it. Examiners reward the candidate who can perform that compression on the page.

Judicial restraint: temperate language and no disparaging remarks

Style is also a matter of tone. A judge writes with authority over the parties, and that authority must be exercised with restraint. The classic authority is A.M. Mathur v. Pramod Kumar Gupta, (1990) 2 SCC 533, where the Supreme Court deprecated harsh and disparaging remarks made against a party and laid down that "judicial restraint and discipline are as necessary to the orderly administration of justice as they are to the effectiveness of the army." Judges, the Court said, must act with sobriety, moderation and restraint, and must have the humility to recognise that intemperate strictures may themselves be mistaken and unjustified.

For the writer this means: do not editorialise, do not sneer at counsel or witnesses, and do not record findings of mala fides or dishonesty against persons who have not been heard on the point. A finding that a witness is unreliable should be stated as a measured conclusion supported by reasons ("the witness's account of the time of delivery is inconsistent with the documentary record, and I therefore do not accept it"), not as a moral denunciation ("the witness is a brazen liar"). The two convey the same finding, but the first is unanswerable on appeal while the second invites a separate grievance. Restraint is not weakness; a calmly reasoned adverse finding is far more durable on appeal than an indignant one. Intemperate language gives the losing party a ground of grievance that has nothing to do with the merits, and remarks against strangers to the suit — officials, professionals, even other courts — are particularly dangerous, because those persons have had no opportunity to defend themselves and may later seek expunction of the strictures. The safe rule is to confine the judgment to findings necessary for the decision and to express even those in the most temperate language that will carry the point.

Tense, person and voice: small choices that aid clarity

Consistency in grammatical choices does real work in a judgment. Adopt a settled convention and keep to it: refer to the parties by their record description ("the plaintiff," "the first defendant") rather than switching between names, descriptions and abbreviations, which forces the reader to keep a mental glossary. Where multiple parties share a surname or a role, define a short label once and use it throughout.

On tense, narrate past events in the past tense and state findings and the operative decision in the present ("the plaintiff has proved the agreement"; "the suit is decreed"). Mixing tenses within a single finding — drifting from "the witness stated" to "the witness states" — is a small carelessness that quietly erodes the reader's confidence. On voice, prefer the active, which names the actor and so makes responsibility and causation explicit — a vital quality when the court is recording who did what. The passive voice hides the actor and is a frequent source of the very ambiguity that earns judgments their remand; "the cheque was dishonoured" leaves open by whom and on whose account, whereas "the drawee bank dishonoured the cheque" closes the gap.

Pronouns deserve the same care. "He told him that he would pay him" is a sentence with four pronouns and no meaning; in a judgment turning on who promised what to whom, that ambiguity can be fatal. Repeat the party labels where pronouns would create doubt, however inelegant the repetition may feel — precision outranks elegance in a judgment. None of this is mere style for style's sake: every one of these choices reduces the reader's effort and therefore the risk of misunderstanding the court's findings. The cumulative effect of a hundred small clarities is a judgment that reads cleanly on the first pass, which is the only standard that matters when the reader is an appellate bench with a heavy board.

Structure aids style: paragraphing, numbering and headings

A well-organised judgment reads as a well-written one, because structure carries the reader through the reasoning. Number every paragraph — appellate courts and counsel cite judgments by paragraph, and an unnumbered judgment is harder to use and to challenge. Group the material in the logical order the statute contemplates: facts, then issues or points for determination, then the discussion of each point with its finding, then the operative order. This mirrors the prescribed structure and keeps style and substance aligned.

Within the discussion, take one issue at a time and dispose of it fully before moving to the next. H. Siddiqui (Dead) by LRs v. A. Ramalingam, (2011) 4 SCC 240, is a cautionary tale: the Supreme Court set aside a first-appellate judgment because the court had jumped past a raised point — the validity of a power of attorney — without dealing with the relevant issue, in breach of Order XLI Rule 31. Disciplined, issue-by-issue structure is what prevents that error. Headings and short signposting sentences are not unjudicial; they are kindnesses to the reader that cost nothing and prevent the kind of confusion that fells a judgment on appeal.

Style and length in appellate judgments: Order XLI Rule 31

The appellate civil judgment has its own statutory template, and it disciplines both length and style. Order XLI Rule 31 of the CPC requires that the judgment of the appellate court be in writing and state (a) the points for determination, (b) the decision thereon, (c) the reasons for the decision, and (d) where the decree is reversed or varied, the relief to which the appellant is entitled. This is the appellate counterpart to Order XX Rule 4, and it tells the writer precisely what must be present — and, by implication, what is surplus.

A first appeal is a rehearing on both facts and law, so the first appellate court must actually engage with the evidence, including the material relied on by the trial court, and record its own reasons; it cannot affirm by formula. As H. Siddiqui v. A. Ramalingam shows, skipping a point for determination is fatal: in that case the High Court moved past the disputed validity of a power of attorney without deciding it, and the judgment was set aside and remanded for fresh consideration in compliance with Order XLI Rule 31. Yet engagement does not mean reproduction: the appellate judge re-states the contested findings, gives reasons for agreeing or differing, and stops.

The contrast with an affirming appellate judgment is instructive on length. Where the appellate court agrees with the trial court, it need not re-write the trial judgment; it may, with brief reasons, adopt the findings it endorses and concentrate its prose on the points actually pressed in appeal. Where it differs, the burden is heavier — it must give full reasons for displacing a finding reached by the court that saw the witnesses. Either way, the Order XLI Rule 31 checklist is the appellate writer's best friend: it guarantees completeness while fencing off the temptation to repeat the whole trial record. A first-appellate judgment that mechanically reproduces the trial court's narrative and then bolts on a one-line affirmance offends the rule from both directions at once — it is too long in its recital and too short in its reasoning.

Reasons before result: the danger of pronouncing the operative order first

A recurring stylistic-cum-procedural vice is the announcement of the final order before the reasoned judgment is ready. The Supreme Court deprecated this in State of Punjab v. Jagdev Singh Talwandi, (1984) 1 SCC 596, observing that "serious difficulties arise on account of the practice... of pronouncing the final order without a reasoned judgment," and directing that the final order should not be announced until a reasoned judgment is ready for pronouncement. A bare operative order divorced from reasons invites suspicion that the reasons were constructed afterwards to fit a result already reached.

For the writer the principle is structural: the reasons must precede and produce the result, both in the order of the judgment and in the order of thought. Write the analysis of each issue to its finding, let the findings drive the decree, and only then pronounce the operative order. A judgment built this way reads as an honest chain of reasoning; one built backwards reads as a justification. The discipline of reasons-before-result is also what keeps the operative paragraph short and exact — it does nothing but translate the established findings into the relief granted.

Timeliness as a quality of good judgment-writing

Length and style have a temporal cousin: timeliness. A judgment delivered long after the arguments have closed loses the freshness on which clarity depends, and the Supreme Court has treated delay as a defect in the judicial process itself. In Anil Rai v. State of Bihar, (2001) 7 SCC 318, the Court, confronted with a High Court that had taken about two years to deliver judgment after concluding hearing, laid down guidelines: judgments should ordinarily be pronounced within a few weeks and, save in exceptional cases, within three months; beyond that, administrative steps and explanations follow.

Although Anil Rai arose in a criminal appeal, its logic applies squarely to civil judgment-writing. A judgment written while the evidence is fresh is naturally tighter, better reasoned and more readable; one written months later tends to over-recite the record to compensate for faded memory, producing exactly the bloated, hard-to-follow prose the higher courts condemn. Good style, in this sense, begins with writing promptly while the case is still vivid in the writer's mind.

Common pitfalls and a working checklist

Drawing the threads together, the recurring stylistic faults that earn judgments criticism or reversal are: unintelligible, over-elaborate prose (the Himachal Pradesh line of cases); excessive length from verbatim quoting and irrelevant recital; absence of reasons on contested points (Kranti Associates); skipping a point for determination (H. Siddiqui); intemperate or disparaging language (A.M. Mathur); pronouncing the result before the reasons (Jagdev Singh Talwandi); and avoidable delay (Anil Rai).

A practical pre-signing checklist follows from this: (1) Can a non-lawyer follow the result and the broad reason? (2) Is every point for determination decided, with stated reasons? (3) Have I cut every paragraph that does not affect the decision or its clarity? (4) Are precedents stated in my own words and applied, not block-quoted? (5) Is the language temperate, the parties consistently labelled, the paragraphs numbered? (6) Do the reasons precede and produce the operative order? A judgment that passes this checklist will be short enough to read, clear enough to obey, and complete enough to survive appeal. For the broader skill set, revisit the introduction to the series and the subject hub.