TIP 8 Place familiar information before unfamiliar information.
This tip and the next three offer advice about how to avoid RAM problems, which refers to a sentence or idea that confuses readers or that overtaxes their brains.
The first of these tips is to tell readers what they already know before you tell them something new.
This is the cognitive equivalent of what happens to most people when they walk into a crowded room. If they immediately see a few friends, they calm down. But if they see a slew of unfamiliar faces, most people will be anxious and uncomfortable. Likewise, your briefs and motions will make judges comfortable if your sentences greet them with old friends — familiar information.But not all information is familiar, so how do you make unfamiliar information familiar? Explain it — after you mention information that is already familiar to readers. This “familiar to new” principle means that you should generally frontload familiar information (both within a given sentence and among the sentences that comprise a paragraph). This principle also requires that you explain new concepts immediately after using them or, better yet, that you introduce a new concept before you use the term for that concept.
For instance, compare the two passages that appear at the top of the next page. Unfamiliar information is italicized; familiar information, or information that is explained a split second after it is used, is boldfaced. Thus, passages should be easier to read if there’s more bold, sooner. Notice that the confusing version of the Statement places familiar information near the end of the paragraph or the end of a given sentence; conversely, the clear version frontloads familiar information, both within sentences and within the paragraph.
Table 4. Frontload Familiar Information
Few things confuse or frustrate readers more than when they do not recognize or understand words and concepts. Thus, be sure to adequately explain unfamiliar terms, parties, names, cases, doctrines — anything new.
Keep in mind, too, that some terms, even if you explain them, will never be familiar to a generalist judge; more specifically, using a barrage of abbreviations will confuse and annoy even the most talented jurists. For instance, one prominent judge blasted the litigants for using too many abbreviations: “Here,” he wrote, “both parties abandoned any attempt to write in plain English, instead abbreviating every conceivable agency and statute involved, familiar or not, and littering their briefs with references to ’SNF,’ ’HLW,’ ’NWF,’ ’NWPA,’ and ’BRC.’... ”15 Avoid alphabet soup.