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	{{a\|~~plainenglish~~\|}}if you take your legal contracts seriously as a piece of code — not every lawyer does, and for some contracts there are reasons not to<ref>If it is a persuasive, [[commitment-signalling]] exercise like an [[NDA]] — no-one expects to actually enforce the literal terms of an NDA — rather than a careful prescription of precise rights and liabilities and clear economic options, as you might find in a financing or derivative contract</ref> —then treat it like code, and number and nest every new proposition or subroutine. Use as many numbering levels as are needed to reveal the logical structure of the document, while bearing in mind that too many levels reveal prolixity and convolution in your drafting. Make sure your [[semantic structure]] is tight.		{{a\|drafting\|}}if you take your legal contracts seriously as a piece of code — not every lawyer does, and for some contracts there are reasons not to<ref>If it is a persuasive, [[commitment-signalling]] exercise like an [[NDA]] — no-one expects to actually enforce the literal terms of an NDA — rather than a careful prescription of precise rights and liabilities and clear economic options, as you might find in a financing or derivative contract</ref> —then treat it like code, and number and nest every new proposition or subroutine. Use as many numbering levels as are needed to reveal the logical structure of the document, while bearing in mind that too many levels reveal prolixity and convolution in your drafting. Make sure your [[semantic structure]] is tight.

	There's a fashion for avoiding numbers because they seem intimidating, but push and nonsense to that. This is a piece of technical writing, not literature, and numbers in a margin don't impede reading comprehension, so there is no harm in “overusing” numbering in a technical document. There is harm in underusing, however.		There's a fashion for avoiding numbers because they seem intimidating, but push and nonsense to that. This is a piece of technical writing, not literature, and numbers in a margin don't impede reading comprehension, so there is no harm in “overusing” numbering in a technical document. There is harm in underusing, however.