Ever heard of the saying, “What you eat is what you become”?
In my opinion, the relation between writing and reading is similar.
What you Read is what you become (as a writer).
If you read nothing but pulp novels and tabloid newspapers, you will write like them.
Most lawyers have probably not descended to that level of recreational reading material, but our everyday professional reading is even worse.
We Lawyers tend to be bad writers because our profession condemns us to a diet of bad reading material.
The very highest we go up the literary ladder, so to speak, is Supreme Court Judgments.
And Supreme Court judgments are widely read, not because they are well written or necessarily well-reasoned, but simply because they are authoritative.
I read somewhere, the advice of a High Court judge on drafting, saying;
“The best way to become a good legal writer is to spend more time reading good prose. And Supreme Court judgments are certainly not that!
So read good prose. And then when you come back and start writing legal documents, see if you can emulate that style, addressing a generalist audience.”
That’s how you do it: get your nose out of the law books and go read some more.