• In the same way that good speaking skills matter during an oral argument, good typography matters in a written document. “But I don’t have visual skills. I don’t know anything about graphic design.” That’s like saying you can’t dress properly for court because you don’t know anything about fashion design.

• Butterick’s First Law of Typography Given multiple documents, readers will make more judgments based on typography as they find it harder to make judgments based on substance. Butterick’s Second Law of Typography Judgments based on substance require reader attention, so under the First Law, readers with limited attention are more likely to make judgments based on typography.

• En and em dashes are often approximated by typing two or three hyphens in a row ( -- or --- ). Don’t do that. Use real dashes.

• The em dash is used to make a break between parts of a sentence. Use it when a comma is too weak, but a colon, semicolon, or pair of parentheses is too strong. The em dash puts a nice pause in the text — and it is underused in legal writing.

• In proper names, like people and places (Albrecht Dürer, François Truffaut, Plácido Domingo). In names, accented characters must always appear accurately. Otherwise, the name is misspelled.

• Underlining is another holdover from the typewriter age. Typewriters had no bold or italic styling. So the only way to emphasize text was to back up the carriage and type underscores beneath the text. It was a workaround for shortcomings in typewriter technology. Your word processor does not suffer from these shortcomings. If you feel the urge to underline, use bold or italic instead. In special situations, like headings, you can also consider using all caps, small caps, or a change in point size. Not convinced? I invite you to find a book, newspaper, or magazine that underlines text. I notice it only in the tabloids. Is that the look you’re going for? No, I didn’t think so.

• I once met a lawyer who had actually set his letterhead in a font called Stencil: What was his target clientele? Army-surplus stores? He explained that he wanted something distinctive. Distinctive is fine. Goofy is not.

• Courts, law professors, and anyone else who needs to set standards for document length would be better off putting these rules in terms of word count. Unlike typewriters, all word processors have a word-count function. Compared to page limits, word counts are harder to evade. To be fair, they’re also harder to verify.

• Mixing fonts is like mixing patterned shirts and ties — there aren’t blackletter rules. Some people have a knack for it; some don’t.

• But have you ever seen a book, newspaper, or magazine that uses this layout? No. Why not? Because it’s not optimally legible. So why would anyone use it? Because it suits the severely limited capabilities of the typewriter. So if we don’t use typewriters anymore, why does everyone still use this layout?