The Volokh Conspiracy has a story about a woman who put up a working paper of a law paper. Unfortunately the paper was "so riddled with grammatical errors and mangled writing that some FAMU law students are now using it to help build a case that [the director] is not qualified to teach and was hired primarily on the strength of her personal ties...." It's an interesting question. While, as a bit of an amateur (i.e. I have no quest to ever be a professor), the issues are moot for me, I have to admit it disturbs me a bit.
It reminds me of a casual mailing list I was on years ago where someone would quote me and always put [sic] on mispellings and so forth. I really hope that the internet allows discussion of very early drafts. However perhaps those hoping for a career track should do more proof reading of preliminary papers, thoughts or even blog posts. I find that unfortunate. I do have some posts that I write, think about, write some more and then rewrite. However most are written ad hoc and fairly quickly. Primarily to get the thoughts out there. If I do rewrites it's typically to correct egregious mistakes after I've posted. Further I see blogging as being more conversational in style.
Part of the problem in style and grammar is that many people (especially myself) think considerably faster than we write. This often results in some humorous typoes such as replacing words with homonyms or even synonyms. All done unconsciously. Then there are outright "skips" of parts of sentences where I thought the sentence but the part of my brain transcribing my thoughts didn't catch it. (Undoubtedly leaping ahead to stay at least somewhat up to date with my thinking - or perhaps however the brain is doing it, it has something like a small buffer that filled up)
It's interesting that often in speaking the opposite effect occurs. Our thinking is slower than our speaking. (Mainly to work out subtexts or query information) Thus when speaking, but not writing, one includes "ums" and "hmms" and "you knows" and so forth. They give a verbal continuation but a mental pause. What's interesting though is that I type only slightly slower than I speak. So clearly something different is going on between the two modes of communication in terms of the cognitive systems at work.
Anyway, that's a long round about way of saying, cut folks some slack. Thinking roughly and inviting discussion is a far cry from having a preliminary paper.
But the key point to this story (which I'd already caught on another legal blog) is that the author is a legal writing professor. It's one thing to have a paper circulated for comment on its substance, and quite another for someone who is purportedly an excellent legal writer to post a paper with the kind of grammatical problems that have made this one rapidly spread among the lawblogs.
That's one thing I could figure out from Volokh's blog. Was this a working paper about ideas or a demonstration of her writing abilities? Clearly it was the former in which case taking it as demonstrative of much about writing abilities seems odd. Put an other way she's being held to a different standard about raw research simply because of her position.
Am I missing some facts here?
Typing or writing and speech must come from different areas of the brain. I can write/type much easier than I can talk. But communicating in speech also requires listening which throws a huge wrench into things for me.
I have a lot of typos in stuff I post online, hopefully mostly in comments rather than posts, even when I re-read things. I think I know what I meant to say and just see it even when I've typed it incorrectly, or something.
But you know there's not much excuse these days for spelling and grammar mistakes in a paper most likely written in Word.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
and Theology
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Blogged by Clark Goble