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Federal appeals court provides tl;dr version of long decision
By adamg on Wed, 06/30/2021 - 9:23pm
The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston issued a ruling today in a case involving five members of a Puerto Rican drug-trafficking ring (for some reason, Puerto Rico is in the same court "circuit" as Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine and Rhode Island). You can read the whole 122-page decision, but Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson, who wrote it, tries to summarize the case, or, as she put it:
For those readers for whom what follows will be tl;dr,3 the short version is that none of the issues raised by these five defendants translate into reversible error warranting vacatur of their convictions or sentences. Thus, we affirm the whole kit and caboodle.
The footnote reads:
If "tl;dr" isn't familiar, it stands for "Too Long;Didn't Read"which, as defined by Urban Dictionary, is "used by someone who wrote a large post/article/whatever to show a brief summary of their post as it might be too long." https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl%3Bdr, last visited June 28, 2021.
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Comments
In protest of “tl;dr”
I was taught in sixth grade in the early 90s that a reader should be able to parse the opening sentence (lede in a piece of journalism), paragraph, and/or the conclusion paragraph and that effectively comprises what the kids call today “tl;dr”. One writing tip I received was “use your last sentence to sum up what you just wrote and then move it to the top of your essay”.
Skip tl;dr and write clear, succinct opening sentences.
Or,
if you're going to tl;dr, put it at the top of the post, rather than the bottom. No point in having a quick summary after people have already slogged through eight pages of your turgid prose.
Title
In other words, a ‘title’.
no
It goes at the end. People that want to know will skip to the end for a summary.
In a reported court decision
The end of the decision is where the summary is.
Unlike expository writing, where you put your thesis in the first paragraph, do note what a paragraph will be about as you start your body paragraphs, and end with a summary paragraph, legal decisions start with the very bare bones facts of the case and build to provide the resulting opinion of the judge (or judges.)