Office of the Chair| Discretionary Edits from the Chair’s Office
I, as Chair of the Assembly, present to you a compilation of proposed discretionary edits. Notably, we don’t have a consistent style for numbers; and titles and sub-titles of laws haven’t been centred, which is non-compliant with the Law Standards Act. If you know of anything else that needs to be corrected, please let me know as well.
The Discretionary Edit Law
Minor Corrections
Inconsistent Use of Numerals v. Spelling
Many laws use numbers spelled-out or use a numeral, and there is very little consistency I can see to this. A good example is Article 5 of the Elections Act:
I’d like to hear from legislators on the preferred method of representing numbers, namely: spelled-out (twenty-four), numerical (24), or both (<10 spelled-out; >10 numerical).
I’d rather have numericals across the board, if only because we don’t really have any 10+ numbers in the laws.
I’d also rather we have the same system for the Charter as well as all other laws, since I know they’re organized differently, but that’s not a major point.
I prefer to leave the numbers in full in the texts of the sections and the numbers to number Articles and sections.
I also think the centralization of titles and subtitles would look much better.
I completely concur with Drei’s method, as it better communicates the difference between texts and sections. For clarification, are Roman Numericals exclusive to the Charter?
I’d generally agree with this — from some quick internet searches, it seems like different style guides have different cut-offs but spelling out numbers 9 and below seems like fairly standard practice. For instance, here’s what the US government’s Government Publishing Office Style Manual has to say:
12.4 A figure is used for a single number of 10 or more with the exception of the first word of the sentence. (See also rules 12.9 and 12.23.)