19 C. Ambiguity — the lawyer's cardinal sin

1. Lexical:The vendor sold the bike to the buyer with the broken headlamp. (whose headlamp?)2. Syntactic:Wills "to my son Ram's children". (Ram alive? — class gift opens at Ram's death…) and the classic Cinderella license misreadings; also "The parties agreed to share profits afterdeducting taxes and filing returns." (does after govern both?)3. Referential: pronoun/two-antecedent traps (Unit 2.1).4. Vagueness:reasonable, undue, promptly, material — sometimes unavoidable standards, but define or quantify where you can ("within 15 days" not "promptly").5. Last antecedent rule: qualifiers attach to the nearest referent — draft accordingly ("vehicles used for hire within the Valley" ≠ "vehicles used within the Valley for hire").