You’ve probably heard about that “serial comma case,” O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy. The decision, Judge Barron of the First Circuit tells us, was based on the absence of a serial comma, which is the second comma here: red, white, and blue. For punctuation nerds, it’s an interesting case, and I hope to write more about it.
For now, I encourage you to read the opinion in its original format. Why? Because it’s outdated, dysfunctional, and annoying. At least that’s what I think. Here are my reasons.
The opinion—
- uses Courier 12 point, a monospaced, typewriter font that’s ugly and old
- uses double line spacing, so on-screen readers scroll twice as much, paper readers turn twice as many pages (not to mention using more paper to print it), and all readers lose a degree of visual understanding because paragraph breaks and large-scale formatting cues are farther apart
- uses 2 tabs to indent the first line of each paragraph; older lawyers might remember when this was a common practice—I worked for lawyers who did it (in 1989)—but it’s typographically dysfunctional and just looks odd
- uses full justification without hyphenation at the right margin; full justification can look good if done well—it’s how most books and other professional publications are laid out—but if it’s done poorly and without hyphenation in a monospaced font like Courier, it looks terrible: gappy and unprofessional, with white space splattered randomly on the page
- uses underlining instead of italics, so if it was meant to look like it was typed on a typewriter, it succeeds
- uses 1.2-inch left-right margins, which is better than standard 1-inch but a bit small; the line length (number of characters from left margin to right) is still too long
- uses numbered sections without text—no descriptive headings and no explanatory headings; you know how the table of contents in a brief gives the reader a preview of the writer’s argument outline? Well this is what the court’s table of contents would look like:
I
II
III
A
B
IV
A
B
C
V
VI
That isn’t helpful.
Readers can probably infer from my critique what the preferred formatting practices would be, but I’ll go over them next week.