Judgepedia:Style guidelines
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This Writing Guidelines article needs to be updated Several style guidelines have developed on Judgepedia. There are guidelines for:
- The typical graphic layout or design of articles.
- Writing guidelines that are a matter of evolved editorial discretion as to where, in an article, certain types of information should be presented.
- Preferences and evolved styles might change over time, as some users experiment with different ways to present information. The guidelines on this page are meant to capture where the general consensus is on Judgepedia at any one point as far as design elements, graphic presentations and general style guidelines are concerned. That means that if you read this page six months from now, it shouldn't have exactly the same guidelines as it does now. Editorial discussions is the page on Judgepedia to discuss, recommend or confer about new ideas or whether a particular approach works or doesn't work.
First sentence
It is nearly always the case that the first few words of the article correspond to the title of the article. These words generally always appear in bold.
Introductory paragraph
Ideally, the introductory paragraph or section of the article gives a crisp, encyclopedic overview of the subject of the article.
Table of contents
- The Table of Contents (TOC) box is generally placed in the upper right of the article. Accomplishing this requires placing a bit of code at the top of the page. That code is:
- {{TOCnestright}}.
Placement of templates
Some articles -- for example, articles about the 338 State Supreme Court justices -- have a template that appears in the upper right of the page about that state's court. Consider the article about Maura Corrigan. If you're writing an article and you want the Table of Contents and any available and appropriate template to appear on the page as they do in that example, at the top of the editing page you first type the code for the template -- in that case, {{Michigan Supreme Court}}, followed by {{TOCnestright}}.
An example of how a left-justified (unformatted) TOC box makes a page less enjoyable to read is the discussion page for Maureen O'Connor.
- Section and subsection headlines should ideally not exceed 3-4 words. This helps make a narrower TOC box so that it doesn't take up so much space on the page that readers can't start to see the body of the article until they start scrolling.
Images
Consider a few articles, such as Stephen Markman and Michael Cavanagh for recommended placement of images.
