Through the past few weeks I've been formatting submitted articles for the Buffalo Intellectual Property Law Journal. After having finished with the drafts, I can comfortably say that the Executive Publications Editor position is:

1. The most difficult and time consuming position on the journal
2. The quality gatekeeper for the final product
3. Incredibly rewarding and reveals how to write a good IP article

What makes the job so difficult is the highly technical nature that Intellectual Property articles must explain. Working as an engineer, and teaching a course on Technical Communications, I fully understand the difficulty of translating technical jargon and data into prose. All too often, authors simply try too hard and over complicate an issue that could best be described in a graph or figure.

The best articles think outside the "Law Journal" box and use non-text to clarify their points.

Of course, this makes my job that much more difficult. Pictures, graphs and charts are rare in legal journals (although I did use the AIPLA Quarterly Journal as an example). Pleasantly, I have the lattitude to format these items in such a way to make it most accessible to the reader.

As an author, I need to take more risks with the way I present information. Digital distribution allows my document to contain hyperlinks to audio, video and supporting information. A picture can really be worth a thousand words, and takes only a fraction of the time to digest.

Now, time to work on that article of my own...