[Joe McGuire]

Wow. Talk about hyper-technical! I'm not totally sure I could make such an
argument with a straight face. In my experience the best briefs I have seen
have been, well, surprisingly brief. In my first real law job--as a deputy
attorney general, I proudly submitted a laboriously crafted draft of a brief
to oneof my mentors, himself the author of many successful Supreme Court
briefs. Thought I'd learn from a master. The result: Fully a third of the
brief disappeared! O the pain!.

"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote in message
...
The courts can indeed be very sticky. I consulted on a case where a
plaintiff was suing on the basis that the defendant's brief was not as
brief as it should have been because the lawyers had used Exactly 24
points line spacing instead of Double.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

"Joe McGuire" wrote in message
...
There are a number of ways. Editing, a/k/a pruning is the time-honored
way. As Shakespeare had Polonius remind us, "Brevity is the soul of wit."
Could that be the basis for the page limit? Presumably your prof did not
set that limit for purely selfish, if understandable, reasons, like "they
don't pay me enough to read more than 2 pages of student prose."

You could also take the legalistic approach, toss away the spirit of the
requirement in favor of the letter. It's the Gotcha approach to higher
education. You might shrink the spacing between lines or even the
spacing between characters to create at least the appearance of brevity,
presuming his or her prescriptions were vague enough to allow wiggle
room. And maybe there is a way to argue that the 2 page requirement did
not so clearly specify that only one side of the page was to be used.
Narrower margins on all four sides of the paper could be the basis for a
free speech argument. After all, you worked very hard on all those words,
even the excess ones.

(Warning: Trying this on a hapless proff might be somewhat amusing.
Should your clever arguments get you through law school, trying to
sidestep a page limit with such shenanigans in a court of law could land
you in some serious trouble.)

"cdedrick" wrote in message
...
How do you shrink a document to make it fit? I have a 2 page paper due
and
it comes out to be 2.25 pages. Without reducing the font size is there
a
simple way to reduce the document to 2 pages?

Thanks