When I was working at Microsoft, I had the opportunity to observe research that one of my colleagues conducted about how college students used Word. During a focus group, while discussing writing papers, the students discussed methods that they used to get around a page-length requirement. I’d heard of most of them: changing the font, changing the margins, changing the line spacing.1
I was amused to read that BP’s lawyers have resorted to the same methods. This is quote from the judge’s ruling:
BP’s counsel filed a brief that, at first blush, appeared just within the 35-page limit. A closer study reveals that BP’s counsel abused the page limit by reducing the line spacing to slightly less than double-spaced. As a result, BP exceeded the (already enlarged) page limit by roughly six pages.
The Court should not have to waste its time policing such simple rules — particularly in a case as massive and complex as this. … Counsel’s tactic would not be appropriate for a college term paper. It certainly is not appropriate here.
It occurs to me that I hope that I haven’t given anyone any new ideas about how to get around page limits by writing this.
- I recall one that was new to me: changing the font (or font size) of just the periods: professors who checked for correct fonts and font sizes usually wouldn’t bother checking to ensure that the correct font was used on every single character in the document, and the difference of a point or two of font size on a period wasn’t visually noticeable. If you were close to, but not quite at, the minimum required page limit, increasing your period size could be enough to get you over the line. ↩