Yesterday I gave another of my Osgoode Professional Development seminars in Toronto, to a sellout crowd of eighty. During a break I discussed with one of the participants what to call the components of the body of the contract. In a follow-up email, here’s what she had to say on the subject: As discussed, in [...]
Two items I posted today considered the format of page numbers and use of logos in headers and footers. And comments to this October 2009 post alluded to putting file names in the footer. So I got to thinking about other things that can go in headers and footers. I’ve sometimes seen the notation “Confidential” [...]
I’ve occasionally seen, or heard of, contracts with a company or law-firm logo in the header or footer. And contracts can be printed on letterhead. Do you include a logo in your contracts? If you do, I invite you to post a comment explaining how and why.
While leafing through a company’s template contracts today, I noticed that they use the page-number format Page X of Y. This page-numbering format offers two benefits. First, it lets the reader know how long the document is. And second, it precludes anyone from surreptitiously tacking on additional pages post-signing. But I don’t find those advantages [...]
Longtime reader D.C. Toedt pointed out to me this post on The Consumerist. It applauds the terms of use of a company called Aviary, in that it offers, in bullet points set out to the right of the full version of the terms of use, a plain-English summary of the provisions. (Click here to go [...]
It’s generally a bad sign when, barely after it begins, a sentence shifts into a set of enumerated clauses: If (1) A, (2), B, or (3) C, then X. Acme shall (1) A, (2) B, and (3) C. In such sentences, the drafter is forcing the reader to make a connection between each enumerated clause [...]
One of the participants at my recent Washington, D.C. seminar asked me about the notation “intentionally omitted.” I love being asked about stuff I hadn’t ever thought of writing about. “Intentionally omitted” is used in a contract to indicate when the text of an article, section, subsection, or enumerated clause has been omitted while leaving [...]
In most printed text that I read, whether in books, magazines, or newspapers, the margins are justified. Here’s how James Felici, The Complete Manual of Typography (2003), defines “justified margins”: justified margins A text alignment in which the type in each line of a column completely fills the measure. This creates straight, (usually) vertical margins [...]
In a press release issued today, Payne Consulting Group announced that it has supplemented its Numbering Assistant® software to incorporate the enumeration schemes recommended in A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. (Go here for a copy of the press release.) I’ve finally updated the “Software” page of this site to reflect this arrangement. In [...]
In a recent post on one space versus two, I cited The Complete Manual of Typography, by James Felici. Since then, I’ve continued reading this book, and I found very interesting what it had to say about the typeface Times New Roman: The most popularly used text faces today are Monotype’s Times New Roman and [...]
In A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting 12.21, I recommend that you use only one space, rather than two, after punctuation, whether it separates two sentences (periods, question marks, exclamation marks) or parts of a sentence (colons). I’m hardly alone in this. The Chicago Manual of Style 2.12 (15th ed. 2003) says “A single [...]
In MSCD, at 12.20, I say “the need to distinguish between sections, subsections, and enumerated clauses and sub-clauses means that using columns is not an option.” We’ll, it’s time to rethink that. I’ve been experimenting with a two-column version of the MSCD format, and it isn’t half bad. Click here for a PDF of one-page [...]
