[2313.DE] Discretionary Edits from the Chair's Office

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).


Centring of Titles and Subtitles

Current Style

Corrected Style

The proposed corrections look good to me. I particularly like the middle format myself, rather than the left alignment.

I think it would also be cool to have the spelling and number in a law: “A three (3) day vote will take place”

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?

Yes, under current practice, the Charter is the only law that uses Roman Numerals, and I quite like it.

Does anyone else have an opinion on the numerical formatting? So far it’s 2 (text)–1 (numerical)–1 (other).

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 nine 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.)

Anyone else have any thoughts? I’d quite like to put this through and tie it off. Thanks.

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I believe that numbers 1-10 should be spelled out accordingly, however every other number can be written out numerically. I’m not sure about zero though. Or is it 0?

My personal preference would be for spelled out so long as it doesn’t lead to more than two words e.g. ninety-nine, one-hundred and two-hundred but 101 instead of one-hundred-and-one.

0 should be spelled as “zero” since it looks too similar to O. Otherwise, I agree that 1-10 should be written out, and every number after should be written out numerically.

I’m more of a fan of us going along with Wikipedia’s Manual of Style:

  • Integers from zero to nine are spelled out in words.
  • Integers greater than nine expressible in one or two words may be expressed either in numerals or in words (16 or sixteen, 84 or eighty-four, 200 or two hundred). When written as words, integers from 21 to 99 that are not multiples of 10 are hyphenated (including when part of a larger number): fifty-six and fifty-six thousand but five hundred and five thousand are not.

Yeah, I think “zero” works better.

I think this is the most correct solution

Discretionary Edits implemented and adopted. This thread no longer needs to be open, any further enquiries should be done via the Office of Assembly Affairs.