proofreading

“Hello. Yes, Once Again, I Want You To Meet Larry. You Remember That He Was A Respected Harvard Law Professor, But The Scourge Of Anti-Trump Mania Has Left Him Silly And Obsessed. Won’t You Help Sufferers Like Larry With A Generous Donation?”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

 

The steady deterioration of former Harvard Law professor Lawrence Tribe is truly a cautionary tale. Bias makes you stupid, but Larry had IQ points to spare, once.  Trump Derangement makes you stupid, and this strain of political hostility is far, far worse than the Clinton, Bush and Obama strains. Once Tribe was infected, his intellect was in peril.

Then he became addicted to Twitter. I tell my legal ethics seminar attendees that Twitter lowers a lawyer’s IQ by anywhere from 40-60 points. Once, Larry could have sustained that and still given me a good game of Scrabble. On top of his ossifying liberal bias and the ravages of Trump Derangement, however, Twitter delivered the coup de gras to his gray matter.

We saw the beginning of this in 2016, when he shattered a basic legal ethics tenet–Larry used to teach this stuff–with a mind-blowing tweet. After Trump’s election, Tribe began making silly claims that the President was impeachable,  and took to Twitter to spread batty “resistance” conspiracy theories, while calling a White House aide  “non human.”

Now it seems beyond dispute, sadly, that Lawrence Tribe is in the end throes of Anti Trump Brain Virus infection. Continue reading →

KABOOM! Roy Moore’s Lawyer Just Made My Head Explode. Or As He Would Say, Just Made My Head Exploded

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I hate early morning head explosions. Among other reasons, those bits of skull and brain ruin the taste of my coffee.

No, I don’t blame Trent Garman for representing a vile creepazoid like Roy Moore. Creepazoids have rights too, and should have access to trustworthy and competent counsel. My problem with Garman arises from those last four words. Lawyers as untrustworthy and incompetent as Garman, in my opinion (don’t sue me, Trent, it’s just my opinion that you’re an idiot; I can’t prove it, but I do think you did), shouldn’t be representing clients. Garman, in truth, needs to go back to the sixth grade.

Here is the letter Garman authored on Moore’s behalf. I’ll follow it with the stuff that blew my head; you don’t have to read the whole thing unless you’re into inflicting pain on yourself, like that albino monk in “The Da Vinci Code.”

If you do read the letter, you will note that Attorney Garman never learned that the possessive “its” has no apostrophe, and that he writes English like it is a second, and perhaps third, language. Here are the best, as in worst, examples of his professional writing:

 Your client’s organization has made and/or supported defaming statements. This is due to the careless and/or intentionally refused to advance the truth regarding our clients. We also believe that your client, by and through its agents, have damaged our clients by being careless in how they handle headlines and report the contextual of the allegations.

The second statement  actually says “This is due to the careless and/or intentionally refused to advance the truth regarding our clients.” Diagram that for me. That head-scratcher is followed by “We also believe that your client, by and through its agents, have damaged our clients by being careless in how they handle headlines and report the contextual of the allegations.”This isn’t even the worst example of Authentic Frontier Gibberish in the letter. This is:

Thus, do you know this clearly, yet significant difference which your client’s publication(s) have failed to distinguish. And the legal requirement that your client retract the stories, to include the details which clearly are false.

I can’t even decide what to bold on that one.

Disturbingly, we learn in Trent’s biography that he earned a Masters in Theology from Regent University and  translated two books of the Bible from Greek.  I can just imagine what that translation was like.

I’m not nit-picking a blog comment or a hasty tweet. Roy Moore is fighting for his professional life and reputation, and this is the best legal representation he can find? That letter is a professional product. Garrman is obligated to be competent and diligent, not to send the message far and wide that the former judge thinks that this is persuasive logic and deft prose. Do they not proofread at Garman & Liddon? Do they know what proof-reading is? Do they know what syntax, punctuation and grammar are? Coherence? Professionalism?

Shame on the Troy University and Birmingham School of Law for graduating this careless, inarticulate boob. Heck, no high school should graduate someone who can’t write a letter better than that. Shame on his high school too. Shame on his the Alabama Bar for giving him a license.(I would use words other than “shame,” just to reliev the monotony , but as I’m sure you understand, my vocabulary is affected when my brains are on the ceiling…)

The legal field’s dirty little secret is that lawyers who can’t write or articulate a coherent argument are not as rare as they should be, and they should be extinct.  Nonetheless they get fees from innocent clients who assume that these hacks are smart and skilled because they call themselves lawyers.

But Roy Moore called himself a judge, didn’t he?

Hmmmm…

Maybe this is what George Will calls “condign justice.”

______________________

Pointer: Red Ipsa Loquitur

 

The Embarrassed Management Apologizes—Again.

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

man_with_his_head_in_his_handsI just cleaned up about ten typos, some of them truly horrible, in the latest Sweet Briar post, which was up on the site including them for three days. The Sweet Briar grads must really think I’m illiterate. I made a note of the repaired carnage on the post, and have nominated it for a year end award, in the category of “Most Typo-Riddled Post.” Boy, I hope it wins.

Still, that’s not enough. I am thoroughly discouraged and chagrined. Thanks to diligent efforts by Ethics Alarms reader Penn and others, I have been catching typos faster of late and even refining my own, miserable proofing skills. The number of errors had been decreasing…and now this. Thus I am reprinting the following post from December of 2010 on this same topic. Back then, Ethics Alarms was averaging 600 views a day. Now the average is close to 4000 a day, meaning that the number of those literate readers inconvenienced by my incompetence every day is almost seven times greater. I’m reprinting it in part because I deserve the humiliation of knowing that I have to make the exact same apology five years later, and in part because I know there are no typos in it.

I apologize profusely for the sloppiness. I am the world’s worst proof-reader, and when I am rushing to get a post finished under a deadline, I am even worse than that. Nonetheless, this is no excuse, and readers who are kind enough to come here shouldn’t have to endure extra or missing words and illiterate spellings, most of which, by the way, are because I can’t type, though my rotten spelling doesn’t help any.

I am so grateful to those of you who continue to flag the more egregious typos for me. Finding out that an article has been hanging out there with these errors is exactly like learning that you’ve been smiling at people with a piece of spinach on your front teeth all day. So I mean it: it isn’t because I don’t care. I’m trying. Obviously I have to try harder.

The Embarrassed Management Apologizes

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I just cleaned up about seven typos in the Randy Cohen post, which was up on the site including them for most of the day.

I apologize profusely for the sloppiness. I am the world’s worst proof-reader, and when I am rushing to get a post finished under a deadline, I am even worse than that. Nonetheless, this is no excuse, and readers who are kind enough to come here shouldn’t have to endure extra or missing words and illiterate spellings, most of which, by the way, is  because I can’t type, though my rotten spelling doesn’t help any.

I am so grateful to those of you who continue to flag the more egregious typos for me. Finding out that an article has been hanging out there with these errors is exactly like learning that you’ve been smiling at people with a piece of spinach on your front teeth all day. So I mean it: it isn’t because I don’t care. I’m trying. Obviously I have to try harder.

And I was so proud of myself for not misspelling “Beuhrle”…

Ethics Lessons From a Missing “at”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

An embarrassing story from Fairfax,Virginia yields several ethical truths.

A Virginia man facing a fine or worse for not stopping properly behind an unloading school bus got off scot free after it was discovered that he hadn’t broken any law—at least the way the law is printed in the statute books.

The law reads:

“A person is guilty of reckless driving who fails to stop, when approaching from any direction, any school bus which is stopped on any highway, private road or school driveway for the purpose of taking on or discharging children.”

Got that? You break the law by not stopping a school bus that is already stopped. Continue reading →

Progress, with a dash of…WHAT???

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Penguin Group Australia had to reprint 7,000 copies of its new cook book, Pasta Bible, last week,when it was discovered that the recipe for tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto called for “salt and freshly ground black people.” (“It’s a cook book!!!!!“—“To Serve Man,” The Twilight Zone)

Guess what it was supposed to say. That’s right. Continue reading →

To Ethics Alarms Readers: Apology Time

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Boy, there were a lot of typos today! I think I fixed them all, but I want to apologize to the many readers of the original versions. The fact that I was writing posts while running around like a headless chicken was my problem, not yours, and my duties of competence and diligence, not to mention professionalism. required me to either meet proper editing standards or not post at all.

I thank you all for your tolerance, and will strive to do better, because you deserve better.

It would sure help if I could learn to proofread.