The chapter gives advice on how to draft a treaty, an exchange of notes or a non-legally binding instrument. It goes through all the main components of a treaty text, including the name, preamble, main text, final clauses and testimonium. It covers the drafting of provisions concerning signature, ratification, entry into force and provisional application. It highlights the special considerations which apply to an exchange of notes or letters, including the procedures involved. The second part of the chapter gives practical advice on certain basic drafting techniques.

The chapter addresses the phases in making a new treaty: negotiation, drafting and production of the text. It discusses how to prepare for treaty negotiations and how to influence the drafting effectively, differences in the making of multilateral and bilateral treaties, and identifying the main actors involved in negotiating and drafting a new treaty. It explains in detail how to structure a treaty text, including title, preamble, final clauses, testimonium, signature block. It then examines the process of preparing and producing a treaty text for signature, including adoption, translation, formatting, binding and sealing. At each stage the role of the Treaty Office is highlighted. The importance of Full Powers is explained, as well as how to produce them and when it is permissible to dispense with them. Lastly, the chapter provides useful checklists for Treaty Offices and depositaries in making new bilateral and multilateral treaties.

The conclusion to this book reflects on how compression and concision may have been fundamental to Austen’s drafting process, especially as revealed in the manuscript to her unfinished novel, Sanditon, written in the year of her death. By the time that Austen was writing Emma, at least, she was drafting strikingly elliptical prose, as in the strawberry-picking episode at Donwell Abbey. The often similarly fragmented sentences of Sanditon are not jottings or shorthand to be expanded later, as they were once thought to be. Rather, Austen’s manuscripts suggest that she channelled the contingencies of the drafting process into some of her most forward-reaching stylistic developments, as she sought to capture the spontaneity of the human voice.