Nerdlaw: Chunks Are Good
Even before we were old enough to join in the world's most persistent debate--i.e., "tastes great" v. "less filling"--everyone I knew at Tremont Elementary School debated something of even greater import:
Chunky v. Smooth
There is obviously only one right answer for any given kid, because an adherent to chunky peanut butter would never be satisfied with smooth and vice versa. And so the debate continues.
But when it comes to legal writing, especially in its longer forms, there can be no legitimate debate. Chunks are good.
After the jump a humble missive on why you dare not be smooth if you want the court to learn, understand, and care about the issues in your case.
Return with me, if you would, to those thrilling days of yesteryear when you sat in geometry class and you knew how to do such useful things as calculate the area or circumference of a circle. In geometry, you used that magical value "pi."
How many digits of pi do you remember? Anything beyond 3.14?
Fine, learn it now. Here they are:
- π = 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375150
At least those are the first 50 decimal places, because pi is an irrational number where the decimals never repeat and never end.
OK, now how many place do you know? Not very helpful is it? That's because it has no chunks.
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But now try this:
3.14
159
265
358
979
323
If you just memorized those as "one fifty nine" "two sixty five" etc., you probably found it quite easy, and you've increased you knowledge of the decimal places of pi by 500% in mere moments.
That, gentle reader, is the power of chunks. And if it works with something as seemingly random as the decimals of pi, think how much better it works with your cogently organized legal argument.
In legal briefing "chunks" come from the headings and fonts and white space and the other aspects of document design.
Chunks and good document design are the difference between
Both documents literally have the same words on the page, with and without "chunks" to separate the bits on information and put each bit where it belongs.
How do you make good chunks? One of the best explanations of chunks can be found (again) in Ruth Anne Robbins' article "Painting With Print."* In the article, Professor Robbins tells how graphic designers create chunks with CRAP.
But to learn about C-R-A-P, you'll have to come back another day.
Or you can read Professor Robbins' article.*
*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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