The Appellate Record : Texas Appellate Lawyer & Attorney Kendall Gray for Fifth Circuit & Supreme Court Appeals

Recall from some recent posts the importance of creating chunks of information to aid the understanding of your readers.  And the way a graphic artist would tell you to create chunks is by using the acronym CRAP:

• Contrast
• Repetition
• Alignment
• Proximity

A great reference for all these concepts is Ruth Anne Robbins' article "Painting with Print."*

All "proximity" means is that if you want your reader to associate certain things together, then put them near each other.  This has both a visual and a substantive component.  

Substantively, if your document has too much  "see infra" and "see supra" and "as previously demonstrated," or "again," then maybe you haven't got the puzzle pieces in the right order.  Think about proximity.  Put things that go together next to each other.

Visually, proximity is most obvious in the way you treat headings and text. Recall the incomprehensible sample document from which I had removed all the chunks.  Part of the reason it was incomprehensible was that all of the headings and text were in the same typeface and in the same spacing. 

But the decent-looking sample document contrasted the headings and the text and then used white space to create proximity.  The headings are preceded by 12 points of white space following the paragraphs to which they do not belong.  The headings are placed "proximate" to the text that they describe because there is only 6 points of white space between the heading and the following paragraph.  Check it out.

Just like Chevy is as American as apple pie--because we've placed them together--this heading summarizes these ideas because I have pushed them up next to each other.

So,create proximity by:

• Placing related ideas next to each other;
• Creating a greater break or more white space before a new section of text; and
• Reducing the white space between the heading and the text it describes.

And if you think this is too obvious by half, just surf around the briefs in your case files or on the court websites. See how often otherwise good lawyers make their arguments more difficult to read and understand by failing to do these very basic things.

But wait! There's more.  Proximity affects other things like how you use footnotes and how lines or paragraphs of text ought to be spaced. But those are posts for another day. Still to come a debate on "alignment," the right way to use footnotes, and a modest proposal that all the briefing rules be changed.

*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).