Personally, I’ve never understood LinkedIn. The original pitch was “Facebook for resumes,” a platform designed to keep you in touch with your most obnoxious professional contacts without having to see their vacation pictures. But lately, it mostly seems like AI-slop with headlines like “What Last Week’s Devastating Floods Taught Me About B2B Customer Acquisition.” Sometimes I wish I cared more about LinkedIn, because many readers earnestly reach out through the platform and I’m constantly behind on those messages. But then I log in and see a string of mini-thought leadership blogs about “Building Teams To Succeed” and I’m once more at peace with letting two months of messages pile up.
Anyway, it’s safe to say the subject of this Twitter post is LinkedInMaxxing.
If posting year-end reviews on LinkedIn seems like eye-rollingly try hard behavior, wrap your head around posting year-end reviews FROM 15 YEARS AGO.
Fire up Springsteen’s “Glory Days” and let’s break down this former associate’s 2 years and 4 months as an absolute god of law.
“The top junior associate with whom I have ever worked,” one former supervisor stiltedly wrote. How do you trust an evaluation of writing skills from someone who waterboards the English language to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition?
“writ[ing]… better than most partners,”
That is not good writing. Deploying brackets to match tenses is an occasional necessity, but the less your sentences resemble equations the better. And if you’re going to cut out the context anyway, just make it “writing ‘better than most partners.’” Because as is, he’s introduced bracketing just to keep a direct quote that he’s just going to redact with an ellipsis anyway. Speaking of the ellipsis, whenever someone throws in the three dots to glide past the middle of a quote, the reader’s first instinct is “so, what did he cut out?” This is something Chief Justice Roberts infamously does whenever precedent doesn’t suit his preferred policy outcome.
Anyway, the reviewer might have said “writes better than most partners” and, apparently, didn’t. It could be a comment from the firm curmudgeon that the associate “writes unnecessary, time-wasting emails better than most partners.” We don’t know. But as applied to LinkedIn self-promotion, it’s a question the writer doesn’t need to invite with brackets and ellipses.
His closer, “will ‘absolutely kill himself for a client[.]’” forces us to contend with a bracketed period for some unholy reason. If he wanted to end with organic punctuation, he could rearrange the quotes in the sentence to end on “a star, period.” Because unless that senior writes reviews channeling Ulysses, that statement was followed in the original by a… period! Yes, I understand the irony that my sentence ended with the word period and an exclamation point. This would land harder ending on that one anyway.
Also, somewhere in this pileup of stacked quotations there is a “who” clause and an “is” clause that never reconcile, and roughly four commas short of a functioning sentence. Which, admittedly, might still be writing “better than most partners.”
Sorry, “writ[ing]… better than most partners.”
The post Guy Posts His Obama-Era Biglaw Associate Reviews In Peak LinkedInMaxxing appeared first on Above the Law.