What's Next for Text:
6. Librating Shape and Motion
Now let me illustrate how electronic text can liberate a shape and motion buried deep in a text designed to marmorealize fixity, a legal statute. Here is a text from the California Highway Code. Legal writing loves long sentences and this single one takes up an entire page. The warning, in plain language, means “Don’t pick the flowers along the freeway.” First, read the text in its original form. (For fun, try reading it aloud.)
Every person who within the State of California willfully or negligently cuts, destroys, mutilates, or removes any tree or shrub, or fern or herb or bulb or cactus or flower, or huckleberry or redwood greens, or portion of any tree or shrub, or fern or herb or bulb or cactus or flower, or huckleberry or redwood greens, growing upon state or country highway rights-of-way, or who removes leaf mold thereon; provided, however, that the provisions of this section shall not be construed to apply to any employee of the state or of any political subdivision thereof engaged in work upon any state, county or public road or highway while performing such work under the supervision of the state or of any political subdivision thereof, and every person who willfully or negligently cuts, destroys, mutilates, or removes any tree or shrub, or fern or herb or bulb or cactus or flower, or huckleberry or redwood greens, or portion of any tree or shrub, or fern or herb or bulb or cactus or flower, or huckleberry or redwood greens, growing upon public land or upon land not his own, or leaf mold on the surface of public land, or upon land not his own, without a written permit from the owner of the land signed by such owner or his authorized agent, and every person who knowingly sells, offers, or exposes for sale, or transports for sale, any tree or shrub, or fern or herb or bulb or cactus or flower, or huckleberry or redwood greens, or portion of any tree or shrub, or fern or herb or bulb or cactus or flower, or huckleberry or redwood greens, or huckleberry or redwood greens, or leaf mold, so cut or removed from state or country highway rights-of-way, or removed from public land or from land not owned by the person who cut or removed the same without written permit from the owner of the land, signed by such owner or his authorized agent, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine of not more than five hundred dollars ($500) or by imprisonment in a county jail for not more than six months or by both such fine and imprisonment.
If you read this aloud with any emphasis or vigor, you soon break up in laughter. And as for sense, you are lost almost from the first boilerplate repetition of shrubs and ferns. It is a pathless wood, on the other side of which, somehow, lurk fines and jail. Yet if only you could see the shapes within the bog yearning to be free, you could understand the statute at a glance. Let’s let them loose. We’ll use space and typographical variation (both free in the electronic writing space, remember) to make the structure clear. Here’s a start:
The animation permits us to focus the boilerplate repetition as what it is, the chorus of an incipient poem. Next, we separate out as a parenthesis the parenthetical “provided, however that.” Notice what happens here? A repetitive pattern (“of the state,” “upon the state,” “of the state”) begins to make a vertical visual pattern which shows us how the parenthesis is arranged and can be understood. Next the opening pattern is repeated, and then the chorus is repeated, again with vertical patterns. And then the third repetition of the “every person who” opening. And then the chorus once more, with a more emphatic vertical boldface emphasis to lend visual order to the repetitions. And finally the core utterance, subject and verb united over the boilerplate repetitions by the same dominant typeface: “every person who”… shall be guilty…”. Play it again and follow the stages which animated text can reveal.
When the suppressed motion is liberated, the marmoreal prose metamorphoses into poetry. It wants, in fact, to be Homeric epic poetry, with its ritual repetitions of fixed phrases and its pronounced oral rhythms. And when we rearrange it, vertical patterns that emerge from the linear horizontality. A visual imagination—the last thing we would expect—is at work here, albeit unawares.
Legal texts are notoriously hard to understand. Might we find, in this new pattern of attention, an increase in efficiency in how knowledge is communicated? The kinetic typographical design seeks to improve the productivity of such a style by separating the main argument, carried in a gothic type, from its endless qualifications and subdivisions. Like all layouts, it strives to lend to the mind the powers of the eye.
Legal writing has come under pressure from a “plain language movement” which seeks to make legal texts more available to the common understanding. Imagine, then, if large areas of legal writing, the kinds that ordinary people need to know about, were accessible in a format that could toggle from the linear to the diagrammatic arrangement. If we ponder the enormous amount of time spent trying to make sense out of legal prose like this, not only by lay people but by the lawyers themselves, we can glimpse the enormous saving in time and effort such dynamic texts might bring. Our eyes are programmed to detect motion. We like it. When we see text move, we are drawn into the movement. And when the movement takes us to a land where meaning has a visual embodiment, we pay invigorated attention to it.