This is why i dropped Law at college.

Im going through a computer law book for my degree, and i find this:

"a term in a contract is reasonable, if it is fair and reasonable to have been included in a contract having regard to the circumstances which were, or aught to have been, known to or in the contemplation of the parties when the contract was made."

I got good English grades at school, but surely this isnt English!

Law is just an excuse to write bad english. In anything other than law, that would be considered a run on sentence. Tax law is just as bad... I had a room mate in college that was an English major. He actually wrote down a sentence in the tax code, diagramed it and rewrote it in order to figure out wtf it was saying.

lol don't you know derf? Law makes no sense so that lawyers can pretend it means whatever they want it to in the current situation

*scratches head*

wasn't Shiny into law or something?

Speaking of Shiny, you didn't lock her in some basement did you Satis? Haven't heard/seen much of her recently. Could be she's just reading stuff of course, or is waaaaaaaay too busy with something.

AAAAAAAARGH the typo's i have to retype every word 2 times. Damn you brain!!

You drunk, its your brain/finger coordination thats off J.

Shiny's still around, she just rarely reads the forums. Lazy girl.

Academia has generally bad english anyway. You should see archaeology. Some of the stuff is appalling! The best minds are generally hard to understand.
On a funny note one archaeologist who criticises bad English in other's works is well known for his atrocious English

As a former Dutch/English student now doing another course involving law, economics and politics, it's really laughable to read what professors of other faculties write.

It's still a lot better than the average person, mind you, but you'd think that someone of their status could write flawless Dutch. On the other hand, I'm sure they have better things to do as a bio-engineer or whatever. And some Dutch quirks are just glorious. dt-mistakes anyone?

P.S. for non-Dutch speakers: dt-mistakes are very frequent mistakes made in Dutch with regard to 1st, 2nd and 3rd person verb suffixes. When you have a verb with a root ending in -d, you still sometimes have to add a -t in order to comply with the correct person. So in the case of 'worden' it becomes either 'word' or 'wordt'...but the beauty is that it's completely arbitrary, you don't pronounce it any differently and you don't even need it to get a correct context most of the time. W00t for pointlessness.

dt is something you learn when you're 12. If you still make such mistakes as an academic you shouldn't be there.

Oh, they make plenty. I sometimes wonder if it's out of nonchalance or just plain stupidity. I even had a lot of classmates who made dt-mistakes in their thesis. Cost them a lot of damage to their grade.

Technically tho- the best academics should be the ones that can expresse themselves and their ideas as well as possible- or at least have someone to help them translate their ideas. If you can't say something simply you probably don't understand it. Orwell's rules are a good reference point for writing good English.

I understand tcp/ip networking, but I bet if I tried to explain it in layman's terms, either you guys would get lost or I'd get frustrated.

I think describing something, complicated or not, is like drawing some kind of tree structure. The length to which one might describe something depends on two things:

a) The intended depth of the question.
b) The knowledge of the person listening.

The less the person knows about the main subject at hand, the more sub-topics need to be explained.

This is the reason why its a bad idea to find a definition of DSDM in a book dedicated to DSDM, when you know nothing about DSDM. If you were to look up a definition of DSDM in a Software Engineering book, that would be much more helpful.

Heh don't get me started about how hard it can be to explain very simple things (for you) to others. I have to do it every day.

Hey J, wanna solve some (simple) statistics excercises for me?

While using SPSS I mean. I've attented one class then gave up cos it was boring. Now I don't know where the fuck to start. go me