“Did you write good dissertation projects 15 years ago? Say no more, you’re hired!’
Personally, I 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 photos. But lately it’s mostly seemed like AI-slop with titles like “What Last Week’s Devastating Floods Taught Me About B2B Customer Acquisition.” Sometimes I wish I cared more about LinkedIn, because many readers reach out to the platform seriously and I am constantly behind on these messages. But then I log in and see a series of thought leadership mini-blogs on “Building Teams for Success” and I’m at peace again as I let two months of posts pile up.
Regardless, it’s safe to say that the topic of this Twitter post is LinkedInMaxxing.
If posting year-end reviews on LinkedIn seems like a challenging behavior to you, consider posting year-end reviews from 15 YEARS AGO.
Cue Springsteen’s “Glory Days” and let’s break down this former associate’s 2 years and 4 months as an absolute god of the law.
“Best junior associate I’ve ever worked with,” one former supervisor wrote stiltedly. How can we trust an assessment of the writing skills of someone who is simulating the English language to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition?
“write…better than most partners”,
This is not good writing. Deploying parentheses to match tenses is an occasional necessity, but the less equation-like your sentences are, the better. And if you want to remove the context anyway, just make it “the writing is better than most partners'”. Because as is, he introduced brackets just to keep a direct quote that he’s going to redact with ellipsis anyway. Speaking of ellipses, whenever someone adds the three dots to move past the middle of a quote, the reader’s first instinct is “so, what did they cut?” This is something Chief Justice Roberts does infamously whenever precedent does not match one’s preferred policy outcome.
Anyway, the reviewer could have said “writes better than most partners” and apparently he didn’t. It could be a comment from the firm’s curmudgeon that the associate “writes pointless, time-wasting emails better than most partners.” We don’t know. But in the case of LinkedIn self-promotion, it’s a question the writer doesn’t need to ask with parentheses and ellipses.
His closer, “will absolutely commit suicide for a client(.)”” forces us to deal with a period in parentheses for some ungodly reason. If he wanted to end with organic punctuation, he could rearrange the quotation marks in the sentence to end with “one star, period.” Because unless this senior is writing reviews channeling Ulyssesthis statement was followed in the original by a… period! Yes, I understand the irony that my sentence ends with the word period and an exclamation point. Either way, it would pose a more difficult ending to this one.
Plus, somewhere in this pile of piled-up quotes, there’s a “which” clause and an “is” clause that never reconcile, and it’s about four commas short of a functional sentence. Which, admittedly, could still spell “better than most partners”.
Sorry, “write…better than most partners”.
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