When you're genuinely interested in a topic, most facets of the argument or exploration may be intriguing. As my bibliography grows and I continually add more in-depth facts to the paper, I find myself questioning, "Who is my audience?"
Who is going to read this paper? Attorneys? Students? HR professionals? It's important that it not be so detailed that it bores those in a non-HR field, yet not so over-simplified that HR experts or attorneys think it's terribly elementary.
I'm gradually solving this riddle by selecting citations that do a very good job at explaining what I don't want to spend 1-2 pages on. In a white paper, the citations support direct quotations, but it's okay to also think of citations as a hyperlink to another world of information, such as you would find in a magazine article or this blog.
That got my brain going down a rabbit hole...with the increasing digitalization of law review articles, will we eventually be able to hyperlink informational sources in real-time? Not only for the purpose of citations, but for creating avenues for further exploration and more in-depth learning. It would be lovely to create electronic paths to information, rather than make the reader refer to an old-school bibliography in order to access the source. Do you think law review articles will ever evolve to function more like an interactive blog?
Spiral silhouette image courtesy of: publicdomainvectors.org
Comments