With apologies to Tina Turner, what’s adultery got to do with it? Reading or listening to books expands your vocabulary, your ability to concentrate, your comprehension and your language skills.
What’s Adultery Got to Do With It?
The legal journal article was mostly fine. It discussed whether college athletes injured in their sport were employees qualified for workers’ compensation benefits. The first case of note is the 1953 decision in University of Denver v. Nemeth, which held that footballer Ernest Nemeth was indeed an employee for this purpose. Four years later, the same court denied workers’ compensation death benefits to the family of a college footballer and coined the term student-athlete.
Then the article’s author went off on a tangent:
“Nemeth’s vindication in his workers’ compensation claim actually spawned the moniker student-athlete, which to this day carries ignominy far greater than that of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne in ‘The Scarlet Letter.’
“Those of us in the insurance industry or working as insurance defense attorneys do not have the time to read works the likes of Hawthorne. We read the writing on the wall and manage the risk associated therewith.”
A Little Background
The 1850 novel “The Scarlet Letter” is set in Puritan New England, a society not known for its liberal views. The heroine Hester Prynne is forced to wear a red “A”, standing for adultery, for the rest of her life because she had a daughter out of wedlock. The book is a standard high school reading assignment.
The claim that being named a student athlete is a shameful designation at all, let alone one more shameful than an adulteress, is pretty hard to swallow. Did the attorney read the book — or even a summary of it? What did he think the A stood for — amateur? Where was the editor of this journal? There is no commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Be a Student-Athlete.”
Reading Makes You Smarter
More concerning is the assertion that busy attorneys don’t have time to read books outside of work. There is always time to read, even if it’s only on vacation. That’s why they call those books that don’t require a lot of thought “beach reads.”
Read on your public transit commute. Listen to an audiobook in the car. Keep a book on your nightstand. Reading relaxes you and helps you fall asleep. It’s fine to only get through a few pages before you’re ready to nod off.
Reading good writing expands your vocabulary.
Look up the words you don’t know. E-readers make this easy. You can highlight the mystery word. A definition will appear, or you can tap Look Up for foreign words, slang or just more information.
Reading is a cool medium.
It forces your brain to fill in the blanks. Unlike, for example, movies, a hot medium which leaves little to the imagination, books stimulate you to imagine what a character or a setting looks and sounds like. Though you may be engaged in the plot of a thriller, your mind is noticing things like vocabulary and sentence structure. You are improving your ability to concentrate and your language skills and comprehension.
Reading books adds to your marketing skills.
When you read something you know will be helpful or interesting to a client or referral source, you can pass along information from or about the book or maybe the book itself. The book doesn’t have to relate to their business or the subject of your case. Hopefully, you have developed a relationship so you know a bit about them. Did you read something that relates to their neighborhood, their family, their hobbies? Passing along this information shows you care about this person more than just their monetary value. Those are the people who are most likely to consult you again and refer others.
“I read!” you might protest. “I read stories on the web every day.” Those posts are short; they do nothing to sharpen your powers of concentration. They usually appear on screen with other distractions, sometimes popping up to obscure what you were trying to read, urging you to click to a different screen. The short length mandates that coverage is superficial. It’s often inaccurate.
Books generally provide detailed, nuanced and reliable information. A book requires that you focus on following the narrative over a longer period. Most web posts aim for a fifth- to eighth-grade reading level, aimed at the majority of Americans — not helpful to a lawyer looking for examples of good writing.
What About Podcasts?
While some podcasts are serious, most seem targeted at turning even important subjects into a joke. Podcasters intentionally use basic conversational English. While “Get To The Point” advocates using plain language, particularly in sentence structure, we also advocate developing a rich, powerful vocabulary to best convey your legal text and speech. Reading books adds to your working vocabulary.
It doesn’t matter what books you read: fiction or nonfiction, short stories or thousand-page novels. Maybe if this writer read books, instead of “the risk associated therewith,” he would have written “the associated risk.”
Get to the Point!
More Writing Tips
Find more good ideas for improving your legal writing and communications skills in “Get to the Point” by Teddy Snyder.
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