I found this article from the American Bar Association interesting. It reproduces a 2006 interview of David Foster Wallace conducted by Bryan Garner. I get these links via email, but I don't think you need to have any kind of membership to view the material. http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/david_foster_wallace_gives_advice_on_arguing_persuasively/?utm_source=maestro&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekly_email
He raises a lot of interesting points, and I can agree with them, though if I'm writing some legal document, I won't be spending a ton of time making sure the transitions are right and all that. As long as I get the point across, I'm satisfied. Making it aesthetically pleasing is of secondary concern.
I've only read the response to his first question and already he speaks to something that vexes me constantly: the disconnect between what we find in the great novels and the advice people give as to what should and should not be presented in a novel, namely, pronounced theme. I love his commentary on in-group jargon. His description is precisely the correct definition of slang. Words and syntax that serve as a badge of membership in a group. Fascinating how he delineates that the purpose of the words as a paradigm can end up subverting the individual purpose of the words themselves. I love the fractal nature of language, patterns ever repeating. What urban youth do with one another in their manner of speech is perfectly reflected in form in the eye-crossing complexity of legal speech, of which you have seen me complain often when I am tasked to untangle it in translation.
InterASSting article. There seems to be a pretty universal science to the methodology he has described in the structuring of arguments that appeal to humans. I came to a lot of the very conclusions he talked about from studying Fiction House Jungle Comics and The Foundations of Leninism.
