Best Practices on Style, Length, Reasoning

The judgment-writing paper is the place where the examiner stops testing what you know and starts testing how you think on paper. Two candidates may reach the same verdict — conviction under one section, acquittal under another — yet one scores heavily and the other barely passes, and the whole difference lies in style, length and reasoning. A judgment that rambles for pages without engaging the evidence is worth less than a tight three-page script that frames the points, weighs each strand of proof and disposes of every issue. The Supreme Court has said, more than once and increasingly sharply, that a judgment must be a coherent, comprehensible, reasoned document — not a literary performance, not a cut-and-paste of precedent, and certainly not an order with the reasons promised for later. This chapter distils the judicial guidance on how a criminal judgment should be written: the discipline of reasoning, the virtue of brevity, the danger of incomprehensible prose, and the practical habits that turn a correct verdict into a high-scoring script. It builds on the architecture set out in our chapter on the structure of a criminal judgment and the foundations in the Criminal Judgment Writing hub.

Why Style, Length and Reasoning Are Tested at All

It is tempting to treat the prose of a judgment as decoration laid over the real work of deciding the case. The Supreme Court has firmly rejected that attitude. In Shakuntala Shukla v. State of Uttar Pradesh (Criminal Appeal Nos. 876–879 of 2021, decided 7 September 2021), a Bench of Justices M.R. Shah and D.Y. Chandrachud devoted an entire judgment to explaining what a judgment is and how it ought to be written, because the High Court's order under challenge — releasing convicted accused on bail — "lacked total clarity". The Court observed that what a court says, and the manner of saying it, is as important as what the court decides; a decision must provide logical reasoning and be easily comprehensible.

For the aspirant the lesson is direct. The examiner is a proxy for the appellate court and the litigant who must read the judgment. If your reasoning cannot be followed, if your points are not clearly framed, if your operative order does not flow visibly from your discussion of the evidence, then the script has failed at the very task judgment writing exists to perform. Style and reasoning are not graded as English composition; they are graded as the visible proof that a judicial mind has been applied. This is why the limbs covered in our chapters on the statement of the prosecution case and the charge framed against the accused must each be written with conscious craft, not dashed off.

Reasons Are the Heartbeat: The First Non-Negotiable

If a single principle governs criminal judgment writing, it is that reasons are indispensable. In State of Orissa v. Dhaniram Luhar (2004) 5 SCC 568, the Supreme Court put it memorably: "Reason is the heartbeat of every conclusion, and without the same it becomes lifeless." The Court added that reasons are the live links between the mind of the decision-taker and the conclusion arrived at, and that the giving of reasons sufficient to indicate an application of mind is an indispensable part of a sound judicial system. A judgment that records a finding — "I am satisfied the accused is guilty" — without showing why, on which evidence, against which contradiction, is a non-judgment however correct the conclusion may happen to be.

The same idea was expressed in administrative-law language in Union of India v. Mohan Lal Capoor (1973) 2 SCC 836, where the Supreme Court held that "reasons are the links between the materials on which certain conclusions are based and the actual conclusions", and condemned formulaic "rubber-stamp reasons" that disclose no real engagement. Carried into the criminal courtroom, the principle means that for every prosecution witness you accept or reject, you must state the ground; for every contradiction the defence highlights, you must say whether it is material; and for every ingredient of the offence, you must show the evidence that proves or fails to prove it. A conclusory script forfeits exactly the marks the paper is designed to award.

Reason as the Soul of Justice: The Kranti Associates Principles

The fullest modern statement of why reasons matter — and what reasoned writing achieves — is Kranti Associates (P) Ltd. v. Masood Ahmed Khan (2010) 9 SCC 496, where Justices G.S. Singhvi and A.K. Ganguly held that "reason is the soul of justice" and distilled the jurisprudence into a set of governing propositions. The Court held that recording reasons serves the wider principle that justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done; that reasons operate as a restraint on the arbitrary exercise of judicial, quasi-judicial and even administrative power; and that reasons reassure the parties and the public that the discretion was exercised on relevant grounds, disregarding extraneous considerations.

These propositions translate into concrete drafting discipline. Reasons must be intelligible and must deal with the substantial points raised; they cannot be cryptic, mechanical or a mere restatement of the rival contentions followed by a bald conclusion. For the examinee, Kranti Associates is the answer to the question "how much reasoning is enough?" — enough to show that the court applied its mind to each substantial question and each material objection. A judgment that parrots the arguments of the prosecution case and then announces a verdict, without the analytical bridge between them, fails the Kranti Associates test no matter how elegant the language.

The Anatomy of a Good Judgment: Lessons from Shakuntala Shukla

Shakuntala Shukla remains the single most quotable authority for judiciary aspirants on this topic because it is prescriptive. The Court explained that a "judgment" tells the story of the case — what the case is about, how the court is resolving it, and why — and that it is the decision of a court together with the reasoning that supports it. Adopting Justice Roslyn Atkinson's framework, the Court identified four purposes of a written judgment: to clarify the judge's own reasoning, to explain the decision to the parties, to communicate the reasons to the public, and to provide the grounds on which an appellate court can act. A judgment that serves none of these purposes is merely an order.

The Court went further and indicated the components a good judgment should ordinarily carry: the caption and cause-title, the case number, the facts, the issues or points for determination, a fair summary of the rival submissions, the application of law to facts, and the final conclusive verdict with the relief granted. It stressed that a judgment should be coherent, systematic and logically organised, with clarity on facts, submissions, the points of law, the reasoning and the operative relief. This is precisely the skeleton developed in our chapter on the structure of a criminal judgment — and the examiner expects to see that skeleton, fleshed with reasons, not buried under verbiage.

The Virtue of Brevity: Length Is Not a Measure of Merit

Aspirants frequently equate length with thoroughness and write padded scripts in the belief that more pages mean more marks. The judicial trend is decisively the opposite. The Supreme Court has repeatedly cautioned against prolix, over-long judgments swollen by the verbatim reproduction of precedent, textbooks and rival submissions, observing that such padding wastes the time of the bench and the reader and obscures rather than advances the reasoning. A judgment is long enough when it has framed the points, engaged the material evidence, resolved the real controversy and disposed of each point — and not a paragraph longer.

Brevity, properly understood, is not the omission of reasons; it is the elimination of everything that is not a reason. You do not earn marks by reproducing the entire deposition of a witness when a two-line summary of what he proved will do, nor by quoting five paragraphs of a precedent when the ratio can be stated in one sentence with the citation. The disciplined judgment states the prosecution case crisply, lists the witnesses by reference (PW-1, PW-2) with the gist of each, discusses only the evidence that bears on the points, and moves to a clean operative order. The granular techniques for compressing the evidentiary narrative are developed in our chapters on the charge framed against the accused and the structure of a criminal judgment.

Comprehensibility and Plain Language: Do Not Write to Impress

The flip side of brevity is comprehensibility, and here the Supreme Court has been unusually blunt with the High Courts. On more than one occasion it has set aside or remanded judgments simply because they could not be understood. In April 2017 a Bench of Justices Madan Lokur and Deepak Gupta remanded a Himachal Pradesh High Court judgment in a landlord–tenant matter, remarking that "one cannot understand this" and sending it back for re-drafting. In January 2022 another Bench, confronted with a similarly convoluted judgment from the same High Court, asked in exasperation, "Is this in Latin?", before setting aside the "utterly incomprehensible" order. More recently the Court has continued to remand criminal appeals where, despite strenuous effort, the reasoning of the impugned judgment could not be deciphered.

The message for the aspirant is to write plainly and to write to be understood, not to impress. Short sentences are safer than sprawling ones; one idea per sentence is safer than three; the active voice ("the prosecution proved") is clearer than the passive labyrinth. Ornamental vocabulary, Latin maxims deployed for effect, and unbroken page-long paragraphs are liabilities, not assets, in a judgment-writing paper. The examiner, like the appellate court, must be able to follow the reasoning at first reading; a script that requires re-reading to be understood has already lost ground that no amount of legal correctness can recover.

Structure the Reasoning Around the Points for Determination

Good reasoning is not a free-flowing essay; it is an answer to specific questions. Section 393(1) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (the successor to Section 354(1) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973) requires the judgment to contain the point or points for determination, the decision thereon and the reasons for the decision. The single most effective structural device in a criminal judgment is therefore to frame the points crisply at the outset and then organise the entire evidentiary discussion around answering them in sequence. The reader should be able to see, point by point, the question, the evidence relevant to it, the analysis and the answer.

This discipline is also what the appellate courts demand. In Santosh Hazari v. Purushottam Tiwari (2001) 3 SCC 179, the Supreme Court — in a passage the criminal courts have adopted — held that a judgment must reflect a conscious application of mind and record findings supported by reasons on every issue arising for decision, the giving of reasons being "the heart and hinge of the judicial process". A script that frames a point but never answers it, or decides a matter no point covers, betrays the very failure of application of mind that the law condemns. Frame fewer, sharper points; answer each visibly; and ensure the operative order disposes of all of them. The plea recorded, as explained in our chapter on the plea of the accused, often shapes which points genuinely remain in contest.

Deliver Reasons and Operative Order Together

A recurring temptation — and a recurring judicial reprimand — is the practice of announcing the result while reserving the reasons for later. The Constitution Bench in State of Punjab v. Jagdev Singh Talwandi (AIR 1984 SC 444) deprecated precisely this habit, holding that the operative order and the reasons supporting it should ordinarily issue together, so that the parties and the appellate court are not left in suspense as to the grounds on which the decision rests. A conclusion divorced from its reasons invites the suspicion that the reasons were manufactured to fit a result already reached.

In a judgment-writing paper this principle has a practical corollary: the operative portion must read as the natural culmination of the reasoning that precedes it, never as a leap. If your discussion of the evidence has acquitted the accused of the major charge but convicted on a minor one, the operative order must convict and sentence on precisely that minor section and acquit on the rest, with nothing left unexplained between the analysis and the command. An operative order that surprises the reader — convicting on a section the discussion never established — is the clearest possible signal of a disjointed, low-scoring script.

Tone: Judicial Restraint, Not Advocacy or Rhetoric

A judgment is written in a register of its own — measured, impersonal, restrained. The narrative of the prosecution case must be stated as allegation, not as established fact, because the court has not yet decided anything when it sets out what the prosecution alleges. Advocacy belongs to counsel; the judge marshals and weighs. Rhetorical flourishes, sarcasm directed at a party or a witness, and gratuitous moral commentary have no place; they convert a judgment into an opinion piece and expose the writer to the charge of pre-judgment.

Equally, the judgment should avoid travelling beyond the issues actually framed. The Supreme Court has been criticised, and has criticised the High Courts, for opinions that wander into observations unconnected with the controversy the bench was required to decide. In an examination, every paragraph that does not advance the framing of a point, the discussion of evidence relevant to it, or the operative disposal is a paragraph that dilutes the script and risks the appearance of irrelevance. Discipline of tone — neutral while narrating, analytical while weighing, decisive while disposing — is itself a mark of judicial maturity that examiners reward.

Using Precedent with Discipline, Not as Padding

Precedent is the lifeblood of legal reasoning, but its misuse is the most common cause of bloated, incomprehensible judgments. The disciplined judgment cites an authority for the proposition it actually needs, states the ratio in a sentence, and applies it to the facts — it does not reproduce paragraphs of the precedent verbatim and leave the reader to extract the relevance. When you invoke Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab (1980) 2 SCC 684 for the rarest-of-rare doctrine in a capital sentence, you state the doctrine and show how the facts do or do not satisfy it; you do not transcribe the Constitution Bench.

The same restraint applies to statutory text. Reproduce a section only where the precise words are load-bearing — the special-reasons mandate of Section 393(3) BNSS (Section 354(3) CrPC) for a death sentence, for instance — and otherwise paraphrase. In an examination, an avalanche of citations is not a substitute for reasoning; one correctly applied authority outweighs ten name-dropped ones. The examiner is watching for whether you can deploy a case to do analytical work, exactly as a trial judge must, and not for whether you can list every decision you have memorised.

Timeliness and the Finished Script: Anil Rai and Surendra Singh

Reasoning has a temporal dimension. In Anil Rai v. State of Bihar (2001) 7 SCC 318, the Supreme Court — confronted with a High Court that had pronounced judgment nearly two years after reserving it — laid down guidelines for prompt delivery: judgment should ordinarily follow within about six weeks of the conclusion of arguments, and where it is delayed beyond three months a party may move for early delivery, with the Chief Justice empowered to reassign the matter. The principle is that once the hearing is over, the reasoned judgment must follow while the evidence is fresh in the judge's mind; reasons reconstructed long afterwards risk being neither contemporaneous nor reliable.

The finished, deliverable quality of the script also matters. In Surendra Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh (AIR 1954 SC 194), the Supreme Court held that a judgment becomes the final, conclusive act of the court only when it is pronounced or delivered in open court — until then the judge may change his mind. The judgment you write must therefore be a complete, signed, self-contained document, not a draft with gaps. In the examination this means the script must end with a clean operative order, the date and the signature line, leaving nothing for a later sitting — a half-finished judgment is, in the eyes of both the law and the examiner, no judgment at all.

Reasoning on Sentence: A Distinct Demand for Reasons

The duty to reason does not end with the finding of guilt; it intensifies at the stage of sentence. Section 248(2) BNSS (Section 235(2) CrPC) requires the court, after recording a conviction, to hear the accused on the question of sentence before passing it. In Santa Singh v. State of Punjab (1976) 4 SCC 190, the Supreme Court held that this is a real and substantial right and not an empty formality, and that its denial is ordinarily not a curable irregularity but a failure that requires the matter to be remitted for a proper sentence hearing. A judgment that convicts and sentences in a single breath, without showing that the convict was heard, is structurally defective.

Where the sentence is severe, the reasoning must be correspondingly weightier. Section 393(3) BNSS (Section 354(3) CrPC) makes life imprisonment the norm for a capital offence and death the exception requiring "special reasons". Under Bachan Singh, those special reasons must demonstrate that the alternative of life imprisonment is unquestionably foreclosed after a balanced weighing of aggravating and mitigating circumstances. The script must therefore not merely announce the sentence but record the reasoning that justifies its quantum and nature — a sentence stated without its statutorily mandated reasons is vulnerable on appeal and incomplete on the answer-sheet.

Common Mistakes and a Practical Checklist

Certain errors recur in weak scripts and are easily avoided once named. The first is the conclusory finding — announcing guilt or innocence without reasons, the precise vice condemned in Dhaniram Luhar and Kranti Associates. The second is padding — reproducing depositions and precedents verbatim to manufacture length, against the modern preference for brevity. The third is incomprehensibility — long sentences and ornamental prose that the reader cannot follow, the very fault the Supreme Court has repeatedly remanded judgments to cure. The fourth is the disjointed operative order — a command that does not flow from the discussion, contrary to Jagdev Singh Talwandi. The fifth is importing the verdict into the narrative — colouring the statement of the prosecution case with the eventual finding.

A reliable self-check before you stop writing: Have I framed the points for determination clearly? Have I stated the prosecution case as allegation, not fact? Have I listed and summarised the evidence and discussed only what bears on the points? Have I given a reason for accepting or rejecting each material strand? Have I answered every point I framed? Have I, on conviction, shown a hearing on sentence and recorded reasons for the sentence? Does my operative order flow visibly from my reasoning and dispose of the whole case, ending with date and signature? A script that can answer "yes" to each — the discipline modelled across our Criminal Judgment Writing chapters — will read as the work of a judicial mind, which is exactly what the paper is built to find.