Disability Law Blog

A Guide to Elegant Writing

I was cleaning out the hard drive and ran across these words of wisdom which, for some reason, I saved:

• Avoid alliteration. Always.
• Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
• Avoid clichés like the plague.
• Employ the vernacular.
• Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
• Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
• It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
• Contractions aren't necessary.
• Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
• One should never generalize.
• Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
• Comparisons are as bad as clich
• Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
• Be more or less specific.
• Understatement is always best.
• One-word sentences? Eliminate.
• Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
• The passive voice is to be avoided.
• Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
• Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
• Who needs rhetorical questions?
• Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

How Do You Describe McDonald's Coffee?

Over on Blog 702 (the blog for Daubert lovers), the blogmeister has this to say about McDonald's coffee:

"As the Curmudgeonly Clerk and Prof. Bernstein continue their exchange on the jurisprudence of spilled coffee, it grows increasingly obvious why this particular meme has taken such firm root in the American psyche. Discuss the McDonald's coffee case, and deeply held convictions come quickly to the fore."

"Our own deeply held conviction, reported in an earlier post, is that McDonald's doesn't sell actual "coffee." It sells an insulting and debauched facsimile, produced by adding artificial styrofoam flavoring to hot camel bile and straining the resulting mixture through a patented fungus. Anyone who contemplates tinkering with the temperature of this putative "beverage" in an attempt to optimize its "taste" is simply living in a dream world."

Pass the cream, please.

Dolphin Stress Test

From David Traver's Social Security website comes a link to the Dolphin Stress Test. (I failed.) You can also try The Insanity Test. (I passed.)

Schluss mit Lustig (End the Fun)

In the Sydney Morning Herald for December 9, 2002 is this article that describes a new German management approach championed by one Miss Mair, who wrote Schluss mit Lustig (End the Fun).

(I ran across this while following a link from the Despair. com website. I was reminded of the Despair stuff by Denise Howell's post this morning. For some reason, I was sent a flyer in the mail last month from our friends at Despair, a company promoting ennui in the workplace. You're looking at one of their posters.)

Here's an excerpt from the article:

Miss Mair, the daughter of a university professor, argues that her rediscovery of the puritan approach to business is one of the main reasons why her Mair and Others agency has survived. "The fact is that work has nothing to do with fun. I began running the company on this principle three years ago and the system has decreased rather than increased the level of stress at work and at home," she said.

Her credo is that fashionable notions such as weekend company get-togethers, "flexible working hours" and "team spirit" have led to a disastrous erosion of the boundaries between work and private life, which has crippled company efficiency and exploited staff.

Looks like it's time for a staff meeting.

Discretion is the Better Part of Valor

I'm late to the party, but this is worth a second look. On July 1, 2003, in the case of Hyperphrase Technologies, LLC v. Microsoft Corporation, U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen L. Crocker (W.D. of Wisconsin) entered the following order:

Pursuant to the modified scheduling order, the parties in this case had until June 25, 2003 to file summary judgment motions. Any electronic document may be e-filed until midnight on the due date. In a scandalous affront to this court's deadlines, Microsoft did not file its summary judgment motion until 12:04:27 a.m. on June 26, 2003, with some supporting documents trickling in as late as 1:11:15 a.m. I don't know this personally because I was home sleeping, but that's what the court's computer docketing program says, so I'll accept it as true.

Microsoft's insouciance so flustered Hyperphrase that nine of its attorneys . . . promptly filed a motion to strike the summary judgment motion as untimely. Counsel used bolded italics to make their point, a clear sign of grievous iniquity by one's foe. True, this court did enter an order on June 20, 2003 ordering the parties not to flyspeck each other, but how could such an order apply to a motion filed almost five minutes late? Microsoft's temerity was nothing short of a frontal assault on the precept of punctuality so cherished by and vital to this court.

Wounded though this court may be by Microsoft's four minute and twenty-seven second dereliction of duty, it will transcend the affront and forgive the tardiness. Indeed, to demonstrate the even-handedness of its magnanimity, the court will allow Hyperphrase on some future occasion in this case to e-file a motion four minutes and thirty seconds late, with supporting documents to follow up to seventy-two minutes later.

Having spent more than that amount of time on Hyperphrase's motion, it is now time to move on to the other Gordian problems confronting this court. Plaintiff's motion to strike is denied.

So, Sherman, you see . . . time does wait for some men.