ABA Section of Business Law
Business Law Today
March/April 1999
Legal-ease
Enter the SEC’s house (left) justified
By Howard Darmstadter
It takes less time to state the general rule for justification than to explain what justification is, so I’ll start at the end: Justification hardly ever matters, so do whatever seems best to you.
For those who didn’t take the preceding sentence as ample reason to skip to the next article, here’s the explanation: "Justification" refers to the way you line up the margins of your text. Logically (and on your toolbar), there are four possibilities:
- You can line up the left margin but not the right. This is called "left justification" or, more picturesquely, "ragged right."
- You can line up both the left and the right margins. This is called "full justification," but is also confusingly referred to as "justification"; when someone refers to text as "justified," he means that it’s fully justified.
- You can line up the right margin but not the left (you guessed it – "right justification").
- You can center each line.
For the main text of a document, only left and full justification are used. The other two schemes are reserved for headings, captions and other special snatches of text.
"Don’t worry" is a comforting rule for justification, but luckily for columnists like me, there are some qualifications. The first is the big one: the Securities and Exchange Commission believes that left justified text is easier to read than fully justified text. You can find this conclusion in the Plain English Handbook put out by the sec’s Office of Investor Education and Assistance, available on the Web at www.sec.gov/ news/handbook.htm.
(The Handbook’s views on justification are only a recommendation, but they’re the recommendation of a book for which Arthur Levitt wrote the introduction. ’Nuff said?)
Don’t get me wrong — I love the Handbook. I wish every lawyer would read and follow it. In the Handbook’s whole length, I only found one other minor point to object to (slim pickings for a curmudgeon like me). But on justification, I think the Handbook went awry.
According to the Handbook, studies show that left justified text is easier to read, because fully justified text often has uneven spacing between words. This makes seeming sense: since each line is likely to contain a different number of letters, you can only make that right margin line up if you expand or compress the spaces between the words. (It sounds like a lot of work, but your word processing program does it automatically.) Such irregular spacing could make the text more difficult to read.
Except that it usually doesn’t. If you tell your word processor to automatically hyphenate your document (and you should), the adjustments to spacing that allow the right margin to line up will seldom be obtrusive. And there is a large body of evidence that full justification is easier to read.
Since "studies" seem to be the rage, let’s do our own. Go to your local Borders and start thumbing through the merchandise. (You, not me, because I’ve already done it.) You’ll find that almost all books are fully justified. Now go to the magazine rack and flip some pages. There are a fair number of magazines that, like the visually sophisticated journal you are reading now, are left justified, but the majority are fully justified. The people who design these publications probably want them to be readable (ok, I’ll make an exception for Wired). What do they know? I can believe that fully justified text is no more readable than left-justified text, but that it’s less readable!? It would take a pretty good argument to convince me.
The Handbook gives an unconvincing example. More convincingly, it quotes Robin Williams (No, not that Robin Williams): "There has been a great deal of research on readability ... and it shows that those disruptive, inconsistent gaps between words inhibit the flow of reading."
Now, Robin Williams is an authority. Her books, The Mac/PC is not a Typewriter and The Non-Designer’s Design Book, should be required reading for every legal draftsman. But the SEC is quoting Williams out of context. Her rule for justification is "Justify [i.e., full justify] text only if the line is long enough to prevent awkward and inconsistent word spacing." How long is long enough? It varies with the type size, but Williams says that for 10-point type (common in prospectuses), a mere 3.3 inches is long enough, and four inches is long enough for 12-point type. Which partially explains why the three-column layout you are reading now is left justified while a two column layout in a prospectus, with 10-point type and lines of almost 3.3 inches, can be fully justified.
Williams’ own books are fully justified. She admits to being unhappy about the uneven word spacing, but likes the look of fully justified type, at least for some projects. (Similarly, my privets look best top-justified.) It’s a trade-off, she admits. The conclusion must be that if your line is long enough (and it usually is), full justification’s uneven word spacing is not going to be a serious impediment to readability.
If, as I’ve suggested, justification isn’t all that important, it might not seem to matter if you’re forced to use left justification. Not always. Documents set in columns often benefit from full justification.
Legal documents contain lots of lists. A good way to present a list (sanctioned by the Handbook) is in separate paragraphs set off with numbers or bullets. Here’s an example: Was the title of this column based on a line spoken by
- Joel McCrae in "Ride the High Country," directed by Sam Peckinpah, 1962?,
- Orson Welles in "Touch of Evil," directed by Orson Welles, 1958? or
- Richard Barthelmess in "Only Angels Have Wings," directed by Howard Hawks, 1939?,
- all of which have a better claim to the American Film Institute’s top 100 than some of the OscarTrash that made the list.
Notice what’s happening at the left margin of the bulleted list. The bullets line up fine, but the subsequent lines are indented ("hanging indents"). This makes the left margin pulsate in and out. And immediately to the left of the list, the ragged right margin of the adjacent column is swaying to and fro.
(At least I hope that’s what’s happening. By some unlucky chance the opposite right margin might almost line up or the bulleted list be in the leftmost column. If my example doesn’t work, take a peek at the "before" example on page 74 of the Handbook, which features a two-column layout that is a small riot of pulsating line lengths.)
I find the erratic left-right shifting of the space between the columns distracting. Fully justifying the columns tends to bring some order out of the chaos, reducing the port-to-starboard roll before seasickness sets in.
So should you use full or left justification for the columns in your prospectuses? Left justification, of course! Until the SEC changes its view, there’s no sense violating a "recommendation" made with such insistence. (Williams’ quote, which is used as the text to demonstrate various formatting options, makes no fewer than 11 appearance in the Handbook.) You can handle the sway problem by not using hanging indents for bulleted lists, as this magazine usually does. It’s not the best solution, but you can live with it.
The problem with legislating (OK, recommending) writing and formatting standards is that, while they may improve the average product, they tend to constrict the better writers — those who know when a rule should be broken.
Take the SEC’s insistence on the active voice. Some sentences work better in the passive. For example, a prize will be awarded (There’s that passive again!) to anyone who can improve the following by rephrasing it in the active voice:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Everyone acknowledges that ...? Well, you get the point. Still, one can sympathize with the sec. The always-use-the-active-voice rule makes sense: Prospectuses have not been written by a gang of Austens manqué. More like manglé.
But the SEC’s recommendation on justification is unlikely to improve the average product. There’s a lesson here. The Handbook erred because it briefly forgot the fundamental rule for all document design decisions: First, Look Around!
And the winner is … Joel McCrae in "Ride the High Country." You can e-mail Darmstadter at darmstadte@trvgroup.com.
