Monday, October 18, 2004
(7:12 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Against Routledge: A Polemic
Does Routledge not employ any copy editors? I'm reading Graham Ward's Cities of God right now, which has a lot of interesting stuff in it, but it has so many comma and even grammar errors that it is sometimes difficult to make out the syntax of a particular sentence. In addition, on my copy of John Milbank's Being Reconciled, in the blurb from Rowan Williams, it says that the book "confirms Milbank's statue [sic]" (on Amazon's Look Inside! feature, this has apparently been corrected). That's the back cover, the part that they're counting on to sell the book, and they can't even get that right. I also seem to remember that a disproportionate number of sentences in Zizek's Organs Without Bodies seemed to end in question marks rather than periods -- no, wait, that's just his annoying writing style.In any case, I don't think this problem is limited to Routledge -- I have noticed similar lapses in a variety of British academic presses. My question: Have the British completely given up on proper grammar and punctuation? Did Thatcherism do that much damage, that fast? Must we Americans be the ones to teach the British how to produce proper written English?
