Posted on 04/28/2011 8:17:26 AM PDT by Borges
Lol!
Secretaries are still great for organization things, transcribing dictation, cover letters, etc. But the workload per attorney is just a lot less now.Secretaries have always been underrated. Nowadays a person thinks just because he/she can plunk away at a keyboard that THAT makes them a secretary. Not so. In the old days, especially for legal secretaries, you had to be very intelligent AND a fast typist.15 posted on April 28, 2011 11:59:08 AM EDT by Paved Paradise
. . . you just don't need as many as you used to, and that's being proven across the legal industry.
Many attorneys, particularly the younger ones, draft their own documents. Word processing programs make it easier to format them, and you can email or electronically file documents yourself with little additional effort.
The big deal about word processing is that it is so much easier to compose/edit a document that way than it is to cut and paste paper. That was what I wanted WP for, not for the formatting. I deliberately edited my copy of your post, specifically to illustrate my point. My edited version says the same thing as yours, in fewer words and is a little sharper (that's no reflection on you, people don't necessarily trouble to edit their posts on FR to the optimum; it's not usually worth it to them to do so).My point is that WP makes me a better writer than I was when I drafted documents longhand.
But wordsmithing is one thing, and formatting is another; formatting is a time sink. The trouble is that while in the past everyone made allowances for imperfections in formatting typewritten documents, with the advent of WP everyone knows that you could have tweaked the formatting a little better if you had taken a little more trouble. And there just seems to be no end to it.Same thing writing a program to do a technical analysis - a little program might take a bit of time to do, technically - maybe only a couple of days - but the next thing you know you have spent a week or two prettying up the output for a report.
So, yes to composition/editing on WP in preference to longhand - and no to the overuse of professional time to pretty up documents.
Oh brother... all you proved is you have more “free” time right now than I do.
Yes, that's likely. I'm retired.But the real reason I went off on a rant there is that in my work I was in a situation where secretarial support was in short supply while, in the pre-WP era, the only way to compose text was with a pencil (tho I am, and was, a touch typist, I never found it practical to use that skill on the job until I had easy time-share access. And even then, people thought it was "unprofessional" to use the keyboard. I got criticized by my boss for doing it, once - because it came to his attention because the secretary got upset because I asked her to do precisely what I advocated in the rant - function not as the originating typist but as the one to convert it from plain text computer printout to standard typed document format.
It's the same reason that I know that Col. Killian, GWB's commander back at TANG, certainly was not a typist. I didn't know the man, but I know the type - and that type of man didn't do keyboarding back then. It was a sexist thing with them. The memos attributed to him would not have been typed by him. And his secretary said that she didn't type them either. Which as we know is perfectly true because they were not composed by Col. Killian, and they were not typed in his office back in the early 1970s on any machine that an ANG would have had, or would even have bothered to use even if you gave one to them. They were, as you know, ponied up in 2004, or 2003 at the earliest, with a view to embarrassing President Bush. By someone who wasn't aware of the visible differences between typewritten documents and those produced by the default settings of Microsoft Office.
You are right about much. I remember the days where perfect typing was very important since you had to erase several carbons so even one or two boo-boos were not good. I recall many times have to redo papers because of a large mistake (e.g., typing a few lines from a sentence below) or because of a boss’s revision. Cut and paste is a godsend!
However, people today think because they can wordprocess that they can do their own work and I think there is a great deal more error in today’s newspapers and even in legal documents that one did not see in years past. I blame it on the lack of professionals who are producing the product.
"Not good?" "Not good!"Even without the carbon copy issue, I found that correcting a single typo was enough to slash my efficiency dramatically.
And single typos are by no means guaranteed. In fact, a single typo tended to make me upset, and cause another.
Cut and paste is such a godsend, indeed. As I suggested, my composition skills were no better than I needed them to be; often when I had written a paragraph I would look at it and know that although it had all the facts in it, it just didn't read well at all and I would have to reorder the sentences. I found that in the very toughest cases of that problem, the solution would lie in completely inverting the sentence order in the paragraph. Doing that in word processing is no big deal - but if you have to have someone else retype the paragraph 3 or 4 different ways before you get it right, that becomes troublesome. Ultimately you wouldn't bother to get it really right.
I hated that.
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