[Originally appeared 1999.]
The e-mail in the brief time since last week’s column brought some additional uses for empty paragraphs and a suggestion for another “law.” Several users noted the use of empty paragraphs to separate adjacent tables, or to separate tables from surrounding text. Another pointed out that authors of e-mail messages who use Word as a text editor may need empty paragraphs to make plain text messages legible.
The law: Avoid extra tabs, especially in columnar presentations. For effective and reliable formatting of columnar material, each column should be separated by a single tab. This rule applies to simple columns of information. Any presentation with enough columns or complexity should be formatted with a table.
Don’t forget the benefits of styles for this formatting. The tab settings for those columns can and should be incorporated in a style named for the number or type of columns. Then if the formatting must shift, a change of the format of the style will change all of the entries.
The writer who suggested this law complained that time and again he received documents that included only default tabs, with as many as necessary to separate the columns.
There is a deeper issue here. Not a law, but a motto: Typing, get over it!
The standards and habits of the era of mechanical typing have been very hard to stamp out, even after nearly more than 20 years of word processing. When one had to change tabs settings mechanically, it was possible, but not practical, to change settings for special parts of a document. Typists left their tabs one half inch (or the metric equivalent) apart, and tabbed repeatedly. Many, perhaps most, still do.
In the era of non proportional fonts, typists were taught to type two spaces after a period. All word processing programs have been designed to include extra space automatically in proportionally spaced fonts. Type one space. After years of preaching this rule to enormous resistance, I can cite as authority Rule 2.1.4 of Robert Bringhurst’s elegant book, “The Elements of Typographical Style.” http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Bringhurst/dp/0881792063
If only we could learn to present the documents of law practice and other organizations with the clarity, beauty and love of print he offers.
This 1999 article originally appeared in Office Watch.Subscribe to Office Watch free at http://www.office-watch.com/