Thinking Thursdays: Making Citations Stylish

Margaret Hannon, guest blogger, Clinical Assistant Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School

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Professor Alexa Chew’s forthcoming article, Stylish Legal Citation, asks whether legal citations can be stylish. Spoiler alert: The answer is yes.

What is a “stylish” citation? It is a citation that is “fully integrated with the prose to convey information in a readable way to a legal audience.” For law-trained readers, well-written citations communicate substantive information about the authorities that support the assertions in the text and the degree of support that the authorities provide. And when citations are well-written, they can “enhance the writer’s experience in the way that well-written prose can.” On the other hand, poorly written citations make it difficult for legal readers to understand the prose. As a result, readers will either skip over the citations or “slow to a painful crawl.”

What makes a citation “unstylish”? Professor Chew groups poorly written citations into two categories: “bumpy” citations and “presumptuous” citations. Bumpy citations interrupt the prose rather than working with it, while presumptuous citations communicate information that the reader expects to see not in the citation but in the prose. Bumpy and presumptuous citations are problematic in and of themselves, but identifying them can also help readers identify other writing problems.

In spite of the communicative role that citations play in legal writing, there is very little guidance about how to cite stylishly. Most legal writing texts don’t treat citation as a facet of legal writing style at all; as a result, they provide little to no advice about how to incorporate citations well. Similarly, many legal writers treat citations as an afterthought—a “separate, inferior part of the writing process, a perfunctory task that satisfies a convention but isn’t worth the attention that stylish writers spend on the ‘real’ words in their documents.”

So, how can you make your citations more stylish? Professor Chew describes a three-part system that any legal writer can follow, focusing on: (1) choosing what to cite; (2) writing the citation; and (3) revising to tie together prose and citations.

Professor Chew begins by providing advice on choosing what authority to cite and how many authorities to cite. She then provides guidance on writing the citation itself—choosing the citation placement, signal, and parenthetical content. As Professor Chew explains, these decisions should not be based on the Bluebook (or any other citation guide). Instead, they “should be driven by your understanding of the prose and its substantive relationship to the cited authority.” Finally, she provides advice on how to tie together the prose and the citations, i.e. how to identify the bumpy or presumptuous citations (which might also be signs of other writing problems) so that you can fix them.

There is one legal writing style expert who does provide guidance about citations—Bryan Garner. But the guidance that he provides isn’t about how to make in-line citations stylish because he views citations as “impediments to stylish legal writing.” Instead, Garner argues that writers should use footnotes instead of in-line citations.

Professor Chew rejects Garner’s critique of in-line citations because it is based on “the premise that writers aren’t up to the challenge of skillfully incorporating citations into their texts in a way that readers can follow.” Using footnotes may avoid some citation problems and may eliminate visual clutter, making it easier for writers to spot poorly written prose. However, it creates other writing problems. Even if citations are moved to footnotes, legal readers can’t ignore them because the citations convey necessary information about the authority that supports the assertions in the text. As Justice Scalia, Garner’s co-author, noted, moving citations to the footnotes thus “forces the reader’s “eyes to bounce repeatedly from text to footnote.” And weaving the details from the citations (such as the case name, court, and date) into the text might solve that problem but creates a new one in that it overemphasizes information that often isn’t worth emphasizing and makes the prose more awkward.

Instead, Professor Chew encourages legal writers to embrace in-line citations. In-line citations give the reader control over how much attention they pay to the citations by skimming them over or reading them in more detail. In general, readers pay less attention to citations than they do to prose, and this allows citations to be placed “right next to the propositions they support, at the reader’s point of need.” As a result, “in-line citations can convey information ‘almost subliminally’ as readers’ eyes speed across them.”

Professor Chew’s article fills an often-overlooked gap in the legal style literature, and it does so in a practical way. I encourage students, professors, and practitioners to read Professor Chew’s article for more detail, especially the “how tos” of making citations more stylish. I didn’t need much convincing about the importance of citation to legal writing, but Professor Chew’s article still made me think more deliberately about the role that citations play in good legal writing. And for those of you who teach legal writing (whether first-year or upper level), her article also makes the case for better integrating citations into the legal writing curriculum. Finally, if, like me, you can’t get enough of Professor Chew’s writing on citations, don’t miss her Citation Literacy article.