The difference between Roberts's pedantry and Roberts' pedantry
"[Roberts] took the opportunity to note, 'The letter is very sarcastic, although Willard inadvertently proves our point about the quality of public education by incorrectly using 'affect' for 'effect.''How many articles like this are there going to be? Is it really so bizarre for John Roberts to want the output he is responsible for to be free of usage and spelling mistakes? In this he is not different from me, most of the lawyers I know and, presumably, most of the "New York Times" reporters I read.
"Those sorts of mistakes, common among casual writers, are pointed out repeatedly in his commentary. He suggests swapping the word 'voluntarism' for 'volunteerism' and offers 'ensuring' for 'insuring.' He corrects the spelling of the country 'Namibia' (someone had written 'Nambia'); demands consistency in first-, second- and third-person references; and rejects a colleague's attempt to use the word 'plurilateral,' replacing it with 'multilateral.'" [LINK]
"[H]e was a stickler for everything, from spacing errors to the formation of quotation marks to grammar . . ." Before there was Windows grammar checker, I would run a search for double spaces in my documents to make sure there weren't any extraneous spaces. I often run a search/replace to change "dumb" quotes to "smart" quotes in documents. Perhaps this makes me some kind of freak. I would also certainly have corrected the spelling of "Namibia" and I always notice incorrect uses of affect/effect, principle/principal, etc.
Roberts does seem to take more pleasure--or have more fun--than most in identifying others' mistakes. It's more efficient simply to expect little mistakes and fix them without comment.
MORE EFFICIENT THAN WHAT???
posted at 12:37 AM
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