Alan Jacobs 105 W 13th Street, 11E, New York, New York 10011 (212) 727-7462 alan@alanjacobs.com

Upholding Values

Am I a member of the last generation of people who can recognize a preposition, who knows where to use an objective pronoun rather than a subjective one, who knows the difference between passive and active voices and can tweak a sentence to quell its passivity, who will never place an apostrophe in the possessive "its," who will never use the phrase "a myriad of," who will not use "their" as a singular possessive? Maybe.

Am I one of the few who can spell without a spell checker, know whether quotation marks go inside or outside of punctuation, and know that the brand name is DuPont but the company is "E.I. du Pont de Nemours"? Might be.

Among lawyers, are there others who know the Uniform System of Citation so well that they need to look up a form of citation in only the rarest instance?

Are there others who have such a high degree of technical precision, yet can write with elegance and wit, and tailor their writing to the intended reader?

Maybe there are . . . but can they also build a website using HTML and Dreamweaver? Nah, just me.

My History in Legal Publishing

Back in 1976, I took a 13-week paralegal course at a school called Paralegal Institute, down on Nassau Street. It was run by a person named Carl Person. The Institute was not too proficient at job placement, yet it hooked me up with a little company called Clark Boardman on Hudson Street. I started as an editorial assistant to the managing editor, Justin Franklin, and wound up staying at the company for the next 21 years. Over the course of those years, hot lead type was replaced by electronic type, I got a law degree at night, Thomson Corporation bought Clark Boardman and blended it with other legal publishers (it's now a part of West Publishing), I attained and lost the title of Editor in Chief, I left the company to become Editor in Chef at Practising Law Institute (PLI). Eventually, West moved all the Clark Boarman publications out of town, and stopped needing an editor in chief. Since 2001, I have been writing, editing, and indexing materials related to law, and some other extraneous materials.