Blogging Like a Lawyer: Text-only?
[welcome to Blawg Review readers! Thanks to Blonde Justice & Co. for presenting a fun and very, very pink Blawg Review # 61.]
Why don't I do things like Kip's Diamond-blogging, or the other folks who dog- or cat-blog? See this brilliant comment by Paul Noonan to Evan Schaeffer's already-brilliant satirical post, Advice to Federal Judges # 3 ("Dear Mr. Schaeffer. I am a federal judge who has a weblog....")
Why don't I post a ton of pictures like Ann Althouse does (brat-blogging?), or pictures of random neighborhood cats? [Update: I note that Wikipedia credits Kevin Drum, of CalPundit fame, with a pioneering role regarding the 'Friday cat-blogging' trend.]
It never felt right. There's at least three reasons why I don't put a picture of myself up on the sidebar, and why I don't include pictures in the body of the blog.
Physician Attorney, heal reveal thyself
First of all, I'm pseudonymous, although only thinly undercover. Dozens of readers, commenters, and fellow bloggers know who I am. I openly disclose what I do, where I do it, and what general kind of cases I work on. I just never felt that my actual, personal identity was relevant to whether my writing was at all interesting, or any damn good. See this discussion in my post, Carnival of the Anonymous, and in the comments, where an innocent question from a loyal reader elicited a rambling, and at times near-hysterical, response from me.
So I don't put up a picture of myself on the sidebar. I don't publish my personal e-mail address, only my blog e-mail address. I don't post pictures of the view from my window, sorry Andrew. It is, however, pretty good.
Illustrations
Why not, as has been suggested, punctuate posts with pretty pictures?
Some do. See the Shape Blog, which would lose almost all its impact without depictions of what they're writing about. David Giacalone (and all his alter egos at f/k/a, the Ethical Esq., etc.) usually interspersed his posts, not with pictures, but with haiku. (Sad to note that f/k/a is now on hiatus; best wishes, David, and I hope you chose to resume blogging if and when your allergy to it subsides.)
Why write in all-words? Part of it is deep, based on the way I first interacted online. Before Gmail (I heart Gmail, and all its functions, including the Chat program, which is smoother and possibly all-around better than AOL IM, is seamlessly incorporated within Gmail, automatically saves chats in a highly searchable, organized way (but also provides an easy to way to go "off the record")), before I knew of chat rooms on IRC, before I surfed web pages using Mozilla/ Netscape, there was a Before Time.
Back Then, going on the Internet meant firing up Lynx, a text-only browser, from within my text-only Unix shell. The web, I came to see, was the text plus the links. Pictures were usually represented by an [INLINE] tag, and were sometimes "clickable" - meaning I had to select them and hit enter to follow the link, still unable to see what it was. Text-only pages were useful. Text-friendly pages were useful. Graphics-intensive pages weren't just too slow to load; they were impossible to use.
Chatting, meanwhile, began with the msg command, and I eventually learned about ytalk (and the xtalk family). Ahh, heady days. That's when I went from touch-typing to speed-typing. Got to keep up with the conversation. [I also learned a lot about errors in speech-production, written form. I knew what I meant to say; other people knew what I meant to say; my fingers insisted on completing words and even phrases the way they were comfortable doing. I also learned that my fingers often made predictable errors, like erros for errors, and wya for way. End of digression.]
As a result, I got a heavy dose of preconceptions and prejudices about Content. Content wasn't pretty pictures. The pretty pics were for people with fast internet connections, lots of leisure time, and less interest in what it all meant. Plus, pictures could be unwieldy, misleading, or even ugly. To avoid all that, my first webpages were majority-text, or at least text-friendly. The visually impaired (or blind, as the differently brained call them) should be able to access my writing without too much difficulty. Understanding it, as with the Sighted, is entirely the reader's problem. ;-)
There are times when pictures aren't a luxury. Sometimes, pictures add a thousandfold to a discussion. You can drone on and on about an intersectional collision, or an innovative product, or a magnificent vista, but unless there's pictures, something is badly missing.
I like pictures. They're virtually required to interpret some kinds of data. They're also potentially very pretty. My favorite source for pretty pictures. But I don't always feel that they add dramatically to what I write.
The other reason, besides early training, for my all-text style, is that I frequently write like a lawyer.
What's a Lawyer like?
(Which reminds me of one my favorite Groucho lines. "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." Say it out loud if it's not clear. Which reminds me of my favorit-est Groucho paired witticism: "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.")
Look at all the blogs out there, the lawyer blogs. Volokh hasn't posted a picture in many a moon. Evan Schaeffer does, but usually only for particularly awesome Lawyer Gadgets (also see the post comments, including sniping between Stan and Ted, which amused me). Ann Althouse, as noted, goes heavily in the other direction, complementing most posts with graphic illustration. But the lawyerly blogs, and even Ann's lawyerly posts discussing a legal issue, imitate legal writing. They're imageless, by and large.
Lawyers write briefs. We write arguments, in words. We write persuasively, sometimes academically, but we never rely on the picture. If there's a Figure 1, we have to describe it sufficiently that there's no confusion if someone can't see it. Law students don't illustrate their student notes. Law professors seldom illustrate their work. Judges seldom include pictures in the text, although there's always exhibits and attachments.
Besides, if I have something to say, I want the words to stand on their own. I'll link to pretty pictures, but I suspect I won't be inserting them in the text anytime soon.
Your reactions?
Why don't I do things like Kip's Diamond-blogging, or the other folks who dog- or cat-blog? See this brilliant comment by Paul Noonan to Evan Schaeffer's already-brilliant satirical post, Advice to Federal Judges # 3 ("Dear Mr. Schaeffer. I am a federal judge who has a weblog....")
Why don't I post a ton of pictures like Ann Althouse does (brat-blogging?), or pictures of random neighborhood cats? [Update: I note that Wikipedia credits Kevin Drum, of CalPundit fame, with a pioneering role regarding the 'Friday cat-blogging' trend.]
It never felt right. There's at least three reasons why I don't put a picture of myself up on the sidebar, and why I don't include pictures in the body of the blog.
First of all, I'm pseudonymous, although only thinly undercover. Dozens of readers, commenters, and fellow bloggers know who I am. I openly disclose what I do, where I do it, and what general kind of cases I work on. I just never felt that my actual, personal identity was relevant to whether my writing was at all interesting, or any damn good. See this discussion in my post, Carnival of the Anonymous, and in the comments, where an innocent question from a loyal reader elicited a rambling, and at times near-hysterical, response from me.
So I don't put up a picture of myself on the sidebar. I don't publish my personal e-mail address, only my blog e-mail address. I don't post pictures of the view from my window, sorry Andrew. It is, however, pretty good.
Illustrations
Why not, as has been suggested, punctuate posts with pretty pictures?
Some do. See the Shape Blog, which would lose almost all its impact without depictions of what they're writing about. David Giacalone (and all his alter egos at f/k/a, the Ethical Esq., etc.) usually interspersed his posts, not with pictures, but with haiku. (Sad to note that f/k/a is now on hiatus; best wishes, David, and I hope you chose to resume blogging if and when your allergy to it subsides.)
Why write in all-words? Part of it is deep, based on the way I first interacted online. Before Gmail (I heart Gmail, and all its functions, including the Chat program, which is smoother and possibly all-around better than AOL IM, is seamlessly incorporated within Gmail, automatically saves chats in a highly searchable, organized way (but also provides an easy to way to go "off the record")), before I knew of chat rooms on IRC, before I surfed web pages using Mozilla/ Netscape, there was a Before Time.
Back Then, going on the Internet meant firing up Lynx, a text-only browser, from within my text-only Unix shell. The web, I came to see, was the text plus the links. Pictures were usually represented by an [INLINE] tag, and were sometimes "clickable" - meaning I had to select them and hit enter to follow the link, still unable to see what it was. Text-only pages were useful. Text-friendly pages were useful. Graphics-intensive pages weren't just too slow to load; they were impossible to use.
Chatting, meanwhile, began with the msg command, and I eventually learned about ytalk (and the xtalk family). Ahh, heady days. That's when I went from touch-typing to speed-typing. Got to keep up with the conversation. [I also learned a lot about errors in speech-production, written form. I knew what I meant to say; other people knew what I meant to say; my fingers insisted on completing words and even phrases the way they were comfortable doing. I also learned that my fingers often made predictable errors, like erros for errors, and wya for way. End of digression.]
As a result, I got a heavy dose of preconceptions and prejudices about Content. Content wasn't pretty pictures. The pretty pics were for people with fast internet connections, lots of leisure time, and less interest in what it all meant. Plus, pictures could be unwieldy, misleading, or even ugly. To avoid all that, my first webpages were majority-text, or at least text-friendly. The visually impaired (or blind, as the differently brained call them) should be able to access my writing without too much difficulty. Understanding it, as with the Sighted, is entirely the reader's problem. ;-)
There are times when pictures aren't a luxury. Sometimes, pictures add a thousandfold to a discussion. You can drone on and on about an intersectional collision, or an innovative product, or a magnificent vista, but unless there's pictures, something is badly missing.
I like pictures. They're virtually required to interpret some kinds of data. They're also potentially very pretty. My favorite source for pretty pictures. But I don't always feel that they add dramatically to what I write.
The other reason, besides early training, for my all-text style, is that I frequently write like a lawyer.
What's a Lawyer like?
(Which reminds me of one my favorite Groucho lines. "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." Say it out loud if it's not clear. Which reminds me of my favorit-est Groucho paired witticism: "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.")
Look at all the blogs out there, the lawyer blogs. Volokh hasn't posted a picture in many a moon. Evan Schaeffer does, but usually only for particularly awesome Lawyer Gadgets (also see the post comments, including sniping between Stan and Ted, which amused me). Ann Althouse, as noted, goes heavily in the other direction, complementing most posts with graphic illustration. But the lawyerly blogs, and even Ann's lawyerly posts discussing a legal issue, imitate legal writing. They're imageless, by and large.
Lawyers write briefs. We write arguments, in words. We write persuasively, sometimes academically, but we never rely on the picture. If there's a Figure 1, we have to describe it sufficiently that there's no confusion if someone can't see it. Law students don't illustrate their student notes. Law professors seldom illustrate their work. Judges seldom include pictures in the text, although there's always exhibits and attachments.
Besides, if I have something to say, I want the words to stand on their own. I'll link to pretty pictures, but I suspect I won't be inserting them in the text anytime soon.
Your reactions?
Posted by Eh Nonymous on
Tuesday June 6, 2006 at 8:50am
*Not all comments welcome. Flippant, facetious, fierce, or fatuous, fine. Fraudulent, felonious, fabricated, facially insufficient, and farkin' futile, fuggeddaboutit.