Wayne Schiess's legal-writing blog. Home is here: Legalwriting.net
"Double-spacing facilitates the reading and comprehension of large numbers of legal documents." State v. Riley, 605 S.E.2d 212, 214 (N.C. App. 2004).
[Plain language] has a bad name among some lawyers. This is usually because they don't understand enough about it to judge it properly. --Michele M. Asprey, Plain Language for Lawyers 11 (2d ed., Federation Press 1996).
A related bonus of a plain language style is the potential for reducing mistakes. Traditional legal language tends to hide inconsistencies and ambiguities. Errors are harder to find in dense and convoluted prose. Removing legalese helps lay bare any oversights in the original. --Peter Butt & Richard Castle, Modern Legal Drafting: A Guide to Using Clearer Language 89 (Cambridge U. Press 2001).
5 Comments:
To each his own, I suppose. To me, double spacing seems far easier to read. As an appellate lawyer, I am glad that briefs have to be double-spaced. When reading an opposing brief, I think it would be far more difficult to write notes in a single-spaced brief than in a double-spaced brief.
Greg,
Yes, if you need to make notes between lines, double-spacing is good.
But I have never understood how it's easier to read. Newspapers, books, magazines, and nearly everything else I read is single-spaced, and I'm fine with it.
Perhaps it is that a single-spaced page in Times New Roman 12-point with 1-inch margins is awfully crowded. My solution is not to double-space but to push the margins in to 1.25 inches and increase the font to 13 point.
What about an extra line between paragraphs though? I always find that much easier in terms of reading, at least for the web.
What Jordan is referring to is called "paragraph spacing" and it's a great idea.
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