About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

LOG IN
LOG IN


22 J. Ins. Regul. 1 (2003-2004)

handle is hein.journals/jloins22 and id is 1 raw text is: Editor' Report In the Editor's Report ofthe Spring 2002 issue ofthe Journal ofI/nsurance Regulation, readers were alered to an ongoing effort to redesign the J/R. Change is difficult but necessary,. and Greg Krohm's editorial summarized that requirement in a clear, distinct voice. One of my goals as interim editor is to carry on with those efforts to make the contents of the JIR more digestible. The aticles that appear in the IR have to be written to a broad audience so the average reader can follow the logic of any particular argument. The difliculy w ith writing to the 'averagereader of theI J/, however, lies in the enormous diversity of our readership Unlike many publications whose readership represents similar demographic characteristics, readers of theJ/R are accountants, lawyers, academics, marketing managers, business executives, actuaries, financial examiners, insurance commissioners, consumer advocates and members of the international crowd. While certain members of our audience have broad general backgrounds and interests, others may have specific technical interests in some issues but not in others Ihat said, even wvith all this diversity, the average reader should be able to read the average article. Historically, a central barrier to this level of readahility has been that many of the articles that appear In the l/R are written as if addressed to a particular audience segment rather than to the general audience as a whole. In fact, one of the first questions that I w as asked in my new role as editor of the J/R was How come academic articles are so hard to read? The most obvious answ er is that academics tend to write articles to other academics, just as legal scholars tend to write articles to other legal scholars and accountants tend to write articles to other accountants. etc. Using the latter as an example. it is hard to translate an accounting concept like Goodwill into layman's terms in such a way as to make it completely understandable to those outside the industry. Similarly, it is hard to write an academic article ora legal article without slipping into the jargon specific to that discipline, Legal journal articles tend to have dozens of citations and quotes from a panoply of legal cases, both supporting and refuting the central argument. The level of detail in the citations and in the various counter-arguments is meant to allow the reader to better judge the merits of the argument, and it is a necessary component of that style. Similarly. an economist reading a technical article wants to see a plethora of detail on the statistics, regression analysis, heteroskedasticity tests, etc., in order to judge the legiUtmacy of the underlying analysis and by extension the genuineness of the conclusions reached by the author. Unfortunately, though, the non-lawyer and the non- academic find that level of detail taxing in a journal with a broad audience like the J/R. the end result is that an important message can go unread by a