Richard Woof retires from the committee
2010

Richard Woof, who joined the committee when it was only 5 of us meeting on a Saturday morning every 2 or 3 months, stepped down in November, more than 10 years after he stopped practising law.

Nick Lear writes:
Richard Woof and I were partners at Debenham and Co. In the early 1980s we were both interested in pioneering property contracts and leases in modern English. Setting out the main information (we called it the “Particulars”) at the beginning of a lease seems commonplace now. Then it was revolutionary and by no means met with universal approval among our peers in the world of commercial property. Richard set about educating our clients, who to their credit generally saw the advantages of clear layout and comprehensible language. We had little time for the received wisdom – that arcane language was right because it had always been that way. If our documents were incapable of being understood by the client, we had failed. Our views were not even shared by all the firm’s partners. One of the younger ones felt she had failed if the client did understand her draftmanship!

Richard and I both responded enthusiastically to a letter in the Law Society’s Gazette in March 1983 seeking interest in starting an organisation to promote plain English in legal documents. Clarity was born. Each of us was to take a turn on the committee. Richard persevered. His service there must be matched by few.

It was not just use of words. Richard was always ready to adopt new technology – mastering early the intricacies of the electric typewriter, the golf ball typewriter, computers and the internet. He had an eye for layout and presentation. Long before others appreciated it, he understood that the look of a document affects the way it does its job. Before the word “user-friendly” came into general use, Richard preached the value of white space, bullet points and the like. In the early days of computers, the rest of us had no idea whether a certain effect could be achieved. Richard made it his business to know what the machines could do – and always pressed the operators on to greater things.

Brevity was always a holy grail. I remember once we discussed the origin of the story of a certain writer who had ended a long letter with an apology for its length, explaining that he had not had time to write a short one. Some said it was Mark Twain. Others favoured GK Chesterton. Richard set about researching the story, worrying away at it for months (it was long before internet search engines). It was typical of him to be thorough in everything he did. I believe he traced it back to Blaise Pascal, 1656. It’s almost disheartening how easy it is today, using Google, to find a version attributed to Augustine (354 – 430 AD) or even Cicero.