Nerdlaw: Thou Shalt Give Thy Reader CRAP (Part I)
Have you ever watched a really fantastic pianist closely--like watching Evgeny Kissin's fingers flying over the keys.
Seriously, watch the Youtube link because there's a point to this.
How do they do this?
Obviously innate talent combined with thousands of repetitions over years of practice.
But you know one thing that would foil even Evgeny Kissin and make his finger's stumble? Taking all the CRAP out of the key board.
After the jump, I'll finally define CRAP and talk about what CRAP has to do with legal writing.
How hard can it be to play piano? I mean there are only 88 keys. They play the same note every time you touch them, right? All you have to do is touch exactly the right key at the right time in the right way and the piano will perform perfectly.
But what if all the keys were the same? What if they were all white, they were all right next to each other instead of having inset black keys, and even worse, what if they changed notes or spacings at irregular intervals?
No pianist, no matter how gifted, could figure that out.
The piano works because the brain can recognize the pattern and organize its information. The piano and the scales or chords you make with it are organized into chunks by the contrast and repetition of black keys and white keys.
Contrast and Repetition: those are the first two aspects of CRAP--which is actually an acronym-- C-R-A-P:
- Contrast
- Repetition
- Alignment
- Proximity
These are the hallmarks of good document design, the "keys" to making a document that is easy to look at and easy to understand because it chunks information
How does it apply to documents? Check out the sample document I used last time and the differences between headings and text.
- Contrast is the reason to make headings bold and sans serif--so they stand out and are readable--while text is normal typeface and serif.
- Contrast is the reason to vary the size or alignment of a heading to show it's hierarchy in your argument.
- Repetition is the reason to use the same conventions for each type of heading or each type of text all the way through the document.
Those contrasts and repetitions create the chunks. If everything is the same--or if everything is so inconsistently different that it is a mess--you wind up with a piano of all white keys or a chaotic and unplayable rainbow instrument.
And again, I'm not making this up out of whole cloth. Ruth Anne Robbins shows how contrast and repetition apply to other aspects of document design in "Painting with Print,"* the source for all things nerdy and beautiful.
Until next time, when we talk more CRAP about legal writing.
*Ruth Anne Robbins, Painting with print: Incorporating concepts of typographic and layout design into the text of legal writing documents, 2 J. ALWD 108, 119 (2004).
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