Blog archive » 2010 » June

Robot Copyeditors

The sales text for a high-Google-ranked automatic editing tool gives us more information about the quality of the product than the writers presumably intended. It won’t be Utopian to say that every time whatever we write, whether a memo, report or a research material, is precise, accurate and effective in single go. It is possible […]

Interview with Bertrand Russell

This is a wonderful film of Bertrand Russell, interviewed aged around 87. Russell lived so passionately, and was active in so many areas of intellectual and political life, that it is difficult to achieve a true picture of all he was and did. One can study his mathematical logic at university (his History and the […]

Does SEO spell ‘doom’?

The crimes against language committed in the name of SEO continue unabated. At this rate, the English language will be extinct inside a year. A deeper circle of hell is even now being fired for so-called editors who commit SEO crimes. Thus does a certain editing site – winner of (and, one suspects, sole contestant […]

Recent projects

Over the last six months I have done freelance work for academics at institutions below. Please contact me to discuss your work, speculative equiries very welcome: International Christian University, Tokyo Sophia University, Tokyo Institute of Education, University of London, UK School of Oriental and African Studies, UK (publication: Making Sense of the Global) University of […]

Revealing ellipses

The Chicago ‘rigorous’ method for handling ellipses in quotations (XV 11.57) is the only one that should be acceptable in scholarship. Chicago’s ‘three-or-four-dot method’ permits an incomplete sentence to be presented as a complete one. Thus, as an example, Chicago says that this passage: [A] The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless: […]