Nerdlaw: Thou Shalt Align Thy Crap
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So, we're still trying to make a user-friendly document by chunking information through the use of contrast and repetition along with proximity.
But one way to strip your document of any comprehensible repetition is by getting things out of alignment. Put some stuff on the left, some on the right, some wacky captions and maybe a diagonal text.
That's not a brief--it's a word search puzzle.
While there is some difference of opinion on the ideal alignment, the debate exists only on the edges--literally. After the jump, the Appellate Record will try to "justify" its position concerning justified text, as well as rocking your world on block quotes.
Too many alignments on a page are confusing. Confusion is obviously not your goal. So, you'll probably have most of your text in a consistent alignment (repetition) with subtle changes to make a point (contrast) such as indenting headings to show their hierarchy in your argument outline.
If you write for an audience that can read this blog, then you are obviously writing for an audience that reads English. We Englishers read from left to right, so the logical alignment of choice is to line the text on the left.
But what do you do with the right margin? Well, it depends. I like the clean look of fully justified text, but certain font sizes and line lengths can lead to spacing and legibility problems. Here's how Ruth Anne Robbins summarizes the problem:
Design experts have some disagreements when it comes to justifying text, but the majority seems to favor leaving the text left aligned rather than fully justified. Text that is “fully justified” is lined up at both the left and right sides.This is common practice in professional printing. The legibility danger is the odd spacing that can result between letters or words. And, even with the correcting mechanisms available in word processing programs, some experts claim that “justified text blocks often suffer from poor spacing and excessive hyphenation and require manual refinement.” . . .
For desktop publishing, then, the choice should be different. According to some experts, keeping the text left-aligned affords the greatest legibility because there is no adjustment needed to word spacing and because “the resulting ‘ragged’ right margin adds variety and interest to the page without interfering with legibility."*
Tellingly, the spacing problems are exacerbated when court rules require ginormous fonts. But ugliness imposed by court order is a topic for another day.
An even bigger alignment issue arises from what I just did: the block quote. Excessive block quoting introduces too many alignments to a page. On a substantive level, if you signal what the quotation is about to say, the alignment is visually communicating to your reader that "You can skip this next part because I just told you what it says."
And that's what judges say that they do. They skip them. And if judges are skipping large portions of your brief, they may also start skipping parts you want them to read. Bottom line, a brief made up largely of block quotes is unreadable.
So, get your CRAP aligned and get your ducks in a row. Pay attention to your margins and how they affect the legibility of words within a line.
Coming soon, a Nerdlaw for footnotes and my modest proposal (i.e., diatribe) against court rules that require us to file ugly paper.
*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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I'm enjoying this series of posts. Thanks for providing a place for nerdy comments like this one.
Your advice about block quotes is solid. If the reader is going to skip them, then you might want to avoid them -- or (as I was taught) to introduce them using enough detail to convey the point, even if the reader skips them. (Another common practice seems to be finding some key sentence in the block quote to emphasize and draw the reader's eye. I'm not sure how I feel about that one.)
But here's the riddle.
These block quotes in every other way seem, according to these nerdlaws, typographically superior to the body of the brief. They are single-spaced and have narrower margins, more appropriate to the font size. The resulting line length (in number of characters) should be easier to digest. And they are visually offset in a way that would normally convey emphasis, not de-emphasis.
According to the theory, the block quotes should be among the most inviting parts of a brief. If the ideal is the booklet form of the U.S. Supreme Court, block quotes are the closest most of our briefs come to that typographic perfection. But we as readers skip over them.
What do you think is going on here? Are we as readers just so trained to seeing sloppy, poorly edited, and unnecessary block quotes that our eyes jump ahead (like our eyes jump ahead over inline citations)?
Good question, and I think there's probably a couple of things going on here, maybe all related to overuse.
First, as to typography, even if the block quote is a better line length, it is too many different alignments on a page if they are overused.
Second, as to substance, there's a big difference between telling a reader what the law "is" as opposed to just what the cases "say." The first requires a lot more work and analysis, and the lazy briefer just skips that part and gives quote after block quote, which means the reader still has to do all the analytical work themselves.
This probably means avoid block quotes at all times other than the rare instance where a precise, extended quote is key and foundational--maybe the key paragraph of the contract or the statutory language being construed. There, what the texts "says" is important. Otherwise, tell the court what the law "is" and what the words mean.
Finally, there is the lazy or harried reader, who doesn't care nearly as much about the case as we do. If you've just told the reader what the case means or holds in the lead up to the quote, the he or she can go read it themselves if they really want to. The change in alignment just signals, "You don't really have to read the next six lines. Move along." I've heard so many judges complain that they do exactly that, and since hearing it, I notice that I do it to.