Stenonymous source Jackie Mentecky comes through with a digital example. It speaks for itself.

For most of my career it’s been a bit of a witch hunt against page padding, that is, doing unnecessary things with formatting and transcription that result in more pages. So when I see things like this, where nearly every name is followed by phonetic, it pains me. Some of us have allowed ourselves to feel guilty over using parentheticals like “whereupon.”

Look, who hasn’t shifted a line down in the name of readability, right?

But writing phonetic after every single thing is inane. To any of you digital executives reading my work, you can wrap this up by using (names phonetic) on the first phonetic name you do. I like to think I made that up. But let’s face it, parentheticals have always been a matter of trying to say a lot with as little as possible. I can’t be the first one. My whole audience is going to hate me for helping you, but this is just too painful to watch.

P.S.

My criticism no longer applies should it come to light this is something that varies jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

Seriously, do it my way.