Bad Glacier

I’m in the process of confirming what everyone told me: Planet Law School II is not really that good. Some parts are completely ridiculous. So I’m gonna mock it a little.

I’ll eventually get a post up about the good advice in the book (there is some) and probably a serious one about my complaints with it.

Begin the mockage:

There sure is a lot of italicization in this book. Lots of scare quotes, too. Seriously, man, we got into law school. We’re not idiots. We “get” your “sarcasm”, “homeslice”.

And there’s a lot of scare talk about how law professors try to make their classes confusing and the law difficult to learn. They don’t want students to become competent attorneys! They tell you to read things you don’t need! Sometimes, they’ll give your final on a completely different subject, just to mess with you! And they kick puppies! And they hope your first-born child turns out to be ugly! And dumb! Like you! In fact, the only way you’ll be able to keep up in law school is if you ignore everything law professors say and instead buy the PLS-recommended primers (pricing information included in later chapters). The only way. You don’t want ugly kids, do you? Do you?

In addition to italicizing every other word of his own writing, the author likes to emphasize things in his block quotes, too. Italics get boring, though, so let’s throw some bold in, too! Sometimes he’ll want to really emphasize something. Screw it, let’s give it the boldtalic treatment!

Some of the quotes have underlining by the original author. I’m hoping to run across a little underboldtaliclining, but I haven’t seen any yet. It’s a long book; I’m optimistic.

Maybe he should stick to quoting large chunks of someone else’s material when it is important as a whole, rather than quoting a block and then emphasizing the important parts.

Also, there have been a ridiculous number of typos and spelling errors in my book. Come on, at least run a spell checker over your writing before you send it to the printer!

At one point, Falcon mocks a law professor for misspelling “impostor” as “imposter”, even though dictionary.com says either one works. Considering the above-mentioned point, you might just wanna let that one go, man.

And I hate his font, especially the italics. The italicized capitals and lowercase letters run at different angles. Seriously, it Looks Like This.

Okay, that’s enough for now.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 12th, 2005 at 8:15 am and is filed under Applying to Law School, Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.