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| WEEK 52 |
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Tuesday, December 25, 2007 Excepting the Polish people, few people know or heard these days about Mr. Henryk (Adam Aleksander Pius) Sienkiewicz [1846-1916]. However, no intellectual, anywhere on our planet can state he/she has a solid general culture without studying the work of Mr. Sienkiewicz. [Please believe this: the great writer, count Lev Nikolayevitch Tolstoy, was just a little child compared to Mr. Sienkiewicz--this is, of course, a subjective evaluation.] Mr. Sienkiewicz has managed to increase the sale of a Polish newspaper overnight form 20000 to 600000 units per run in 1884. That performance is an historic publishing record, and it is worth studying the way it was achieved: the "technique" could be easily employed today to boost the sale of many newspapers struggling to survive. In 1905 Mr. Sienkiewicz was awarded the Nobel Prize for lifetime achievements as epic writer. Although he wrote mostly about Polish history, the richness and the accuracy of his (literary) descriptions, and the deep, profound humanitarian content of his novels is overwhelmingly touching to anybody, anywhere on our planet. Few of his most famous books are: A. "The Trilogy" [comprising: 1. "With Fire and Sword", 1884; 2. "The Deluge", 1886; 3. "Pan Wolodyjowski", 1888]. B. "The Teutonic Knights" [also translated as "The Knights of the Cross"], 1900. C. "Without Dogma", 1891. D. "The Polaniecki Family", 1894. E. "Quo Vadis", 1895. "Quo Vadis" in Latin is translated as "Where to are you leaving". QUO VADIS ENGLISH GRAMMAR Somebody was alluding, someplace on the Internet, that Corollary Theorems Amazing Articles contain few grammar/spelling/meaning mistakes. Yes, we admit that is possible; however, we do revise the Articles from time to time, and we will correct any existing mistakes. Our problem is, Corollary Theorems site is written by few people working on a voluntary basis--our income is far from sufficient for paying anyone anything. The company itself has only few people working actively to sustain it, and the time they afford to allocate for that is minimal at best. However, the books we sell are indeed exceptional and the best ones in the entire world. Sooner or later, people are going to discover our books; meanwhile, we have plenty of work to do--in our little spare time.  Last week we started looking at the form and the meaning of few articles published by reputable, world-famous publishers: The New York Times, CNN, BBC, International Spiegel Online, etc. This week we took a closer look. We are certain you will not believe this--though you could easily find ANY Internet article from the mentioned publishers and discover it for yourself: most of their articles contain (serious) grammatical mistakes/errors. Corollary Theorems is a tiny company and we do not have the money, the time, and sufficient people to proof-edit our articles appropriately--we know this is not a good excuse, and we do promise we will correct our mistakes in the future. However, for such great publishers, as is The New York Times, excuses are difficult to find. We will refrain from publishing samples of their mistakes at this time; we will only list the most frequent types of mistakes. In the future, however, we will start analyzing in some details articles published by The New York Times, CNN, and BBC--Der Spiegel is a German publisher, therefore their mistakes are natural. First of all, all mentioned publishers do not structure (complex) sentences appropriately, meaning, comma splice is a frequent occurrence. (In Logically Structured English Grammar it is mentioned that using comma contrary to grammatical rules is not a mistake as along as the purpose is to enhance the meaning; however, "perseverare diabolicum est" ["perseverance is diabolical"] since it may be taken as lack of sufficient grammatical knowledge.) In a bit opposite context, placing the adversative conjunction "but" at the very beginning of the sentence is not allowed. Sure, "but" may also work as introductory adverb placed at the very beginning of the sentence, except in that instance it should be marked/isolated by one comma. Another alternative is to replace the archaic introductory adverb "but" with its synonyms: "though", "although", "however", "except", etc. In addition to incorrect morphologic/syntactic structures, we have noticed that the meaning itself is sometimes chaotically presented--particularly at The New York Times. The articles are way too long, and the topics are presented apparently at random. As a result, it is difficult to understand the main idea/topic; on the other hand, we were left with the impression that the topics were a bit artificially constructed/fabricated in order to support/enhance the title topic. We have noticed few incorrect verb tenses--at BBC--though that could be accidental. Incorrect tenses, however, are easily noticed, therefore we draw the conclusion the authors worked in a rush, and they did not have the luxury to proof-edit their work appropriately--that happens to anyone. Another interesting aspect common to all publishers is the excessive use of the appositive constructions. Appositions are greatly needed to present additional details to the topic, though abusing them is not recommended. Note that short appositions may be isolated within commas or not; all publishers prefer to employ commas in all instances. We discovered that many relative principal clauses are incorrectly marked/highlighted; therefore, we strongly recommend a "brush up" with the relative adjective "which". On the same topic, the use of the archaic relative adjective "that"--by all publishers--instead of "which" is perplexing. Again, "that" is a multifunctional word, therefore its use needs to be limited to minimum necessary. An alarming general trend is the incorrectly placed adverbs, particularly of time and mode (intensifiers). The rule of placing the adverbs after the first auxiliary/(modal defective) does not help forming correct meanings in all instances. Placing adverbs correctly is thoroughly presented in LSEG. To end this, whenever you write about some topic, start with structuring your ideas (the meaning) first, and then try to shape them appropriately. If you do have the time to proof-edit your work, that is very good; if you do not have sufficient time, then brush up during holidays, from time to time, with a good English grammar book. Our recommendation is, naturally, Logically Structured English Grammar: it helps a lot! ***
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