Look! Look! A Dinosaur!

by Marsha Watson-Smitherman, PP, PLS

I will freely admit to a number of character flaws.  Although I enjoy e-mail, because I am able to write fast enough to communicate pretty thoroughly that way, the idea of reading e-mail out of a device small enough to fit in my hand doesn’t sound appealing to me.  I like Wikkipedia because I can quickly track down key dates, the names of the players, and a rough outline of what happened to whom and why, but I just find it more enjoyable to explore a historical period through a well developed piece of writing that took the author a number of years to research and synthesize.

There is no way to pick up a computer where you left off—without wading through a week’s worth of pop-up ads, without overwhelming your eyes with highly saturated colors laid out in designs only LSD users could see just a few decades ago, without struggling with scrolling features that blast the document you’re reading completely off the screen and into the next county—and just sit down and enjoy the story.

There is nothing quite like a hardback book.  You can read it, highlight it, really bookmark it and really pick it back up right where you left off, carry it with you to places where there are no outlets—not even WiFi—read it over and over again (I read Pride and Prejudice, Gone with the Wind, Shibumi, Andromeda Strain, and The Perfect Storm every single year).  I carried a book on weather everywhere I went in second and third grade—even to a baseball game.

Since I’ve joined NALS (over 10 years ago now), the Basic and Advanced Manual for the Lawyer’s Assistant have been my mainstay.  First I studied them, then I started teaching study groups.  I used them in my work on the Certifying Board when I first began national committee work.  In my recent work on the Education Committee, I did a lot of quality control and proofreading and re-annotation using these wonderful books.  I helped write a mock exam using them recently.  And all that time, these texts waited at my desk, ready any time I needed more information about a new area of law—I started new jobs with attorneys in corporate, tax, real estate, environmental, appeals, and collection law over the last ten years.

Now I’m chairman of the small but mighty Text Development Committee, which has the challenging task of updating the Advanced Manual for the Lawyer’s Assistant this year.  I just want to encourage all of you to look back to how much use you have gotten from your PP and PLS study texts.  Get them out again and think about the ways they may help you or your coworkers to understand the work you do for a living a little bit better.  Think about helping out your LSA with a study group or cram weekend.  And if there is any way that Text Development can help make these books meet your needs better—let us know.  My e-mail is msmitherman@lathropgage.com. 

What’s that sound I hear?  Kind of a loud trumpeting noise?  A whole herd of dinosaurs!
And every one of them is reading a book!