Proofreading 247 wrestles with English

The other day I was searching online for proofreading jobs, and came across Proofreading 247’s remarkable website—or at least one version of it, since they have two different English-language websites, www.proofreading247.com and www.proofreading.co.uk, sites whose writing is equally appalling. Sentence after bungled sentence on both websites involves some mistake or infelicity, errors which would be funny anywhere but are hilarious on a proofreading website.

Before I go on I should point out that the people who did the writing for the website probably aren’t the same people who do the proofreading for it. The reviews for the proofreading itself are positive, so don’t stop buying that tasty kebab from your local takeaway just because someone made a bodge job of their signage. Also, some of the mistakes are so eccentric that they were probably not written by native English speakers. If that is the case, then it might make this article an unpleasant, Jeremy Kyle-esque bear-baiting session, were it not that at the same time as the writer mangles language, he also sanctimoniously badgers readers, informing them in stentorian tones that their bad grammar will result in certain embarrassment. I therefore grin my superior grin with no guilt, I just can’t tell how many of the fish I’ve shot were in barrels all along.

The front page isn’t promising. Do ‘not let your grammatical mistakes detract from your company’s professional image’, it tells us condescendingly, before continuing with delicious irony: ‘In today’s world, good grammar is essential to create first impression of you as of educated and credible person.’ I agree. They are also right, I think, that writing correctly helps you personally get taken seriously, as the Services page tells us in its hectoring tone. ‘As far as I’m concerned, what you write is a reflection of you. If your document is full of errors, people won’t take what you have to say seriously.’ Yikes. Fortunately they offer us advice, ‘When writing your CV, you need to bare in mind …’ which is bare silliness.

If we wanted to point this all out to them we might go to their Contact Us page. ‘Do you need a help?’ it asks politely, adding, ‘We are always happy to help your requirements.’ Well, how can we get our requirements helped? ‘Call us at our phone numbers below and speak to our Proofreading 247 support team who are available 24/7’ is their instruction, with its command to call multiple phone numbers, and its wonderful 24/7 circularity. If you don’t want to call, ‘you can write in the fields below to send your enquiry to us and we will come back to you ASAP possible’.

What is this organisation where people can reply as fast as possible possible? Here are a few paragraphs from the About page:

At Proofreading 247, we help writers reach their highest potential. Our main aim is to help someone in a developing country express himself or herself clearly in English, Proofreading 247 ensures that the work will be judged on merit, not linguistic issues. Whatever maybe the case, we are here to help you out!

At Proofreading 247, our main aim is to provide a high quality proofreading service which is backed by fixed guarantees and years of experience in the business. Our greatest strength is our crew of professional proof readers who come from a broad range of backgrounds, having vast experience. There are many reasons that explain why you can trust Proofreading 247. Below we are demonstrating few of:

• Our very competitive prices are based on the word-count and the time you require the work in but we convince you that the high quality you will obtain will meet respectively the price that you pay.
• Proofreading 247 guarantee to proofread your document right on time before the time-limit that you tell us in your order form.
• Proofreading 247 guarantee an effective service and offer you 100% satisfaction. If you are unhappy with any aspect of our service we will refund your money or proofread your document again gratis.
• With our automated submission process, we can start correcting your essay right away and get it back to you in as little time as 24 hours.
• We respect your privacy; no information that you provide us will be disclosed in any case.

We employ only the best authors for our proof reading to ensure a quality service. All of our proof readers are native English speakers, educated at least to Masters level (some hold a PhD) with extensive university teaching and examining experience

Should that comma after ‘English’ in the first paragraph be a period? Yes it should. Should there be a period at the end of the blue writing at the end? Yes. Why isn’t it there? Who knows. And who knows what the phrase ‘Below we are demonstrating few of:’ means? If they’re saying that below they demonstrate few reasons indeed to trust Proofreading 247, then they’ve done a splendid job of matching form to content.

They also do a splendid job of telling us their main aim: §1 lets us know that it is to help those in developing countries, a commendable purpose indeed. But then they get so carried with their success that they include another main aim in §2, which just seems greedy. I’m not sure what the second main aim is either. Are they aiming to have years of experience, or to back their service with fixed guarantees perhaps? If it’s the former then I’m glad they aim for years of experience, I just wish they’d got that experience before making their website, so that they didn’t have calamities like their first bullet point, …

… which is an unusual sentence encouraging us that although (‘but’) their prices are competitive, their service is really very good value. What? Anyway, though that adversative might be hard to stomach, they kindly reassure us: ‘we convince you [that it really is so]’, a statement of awe-inspiring presumption. The most unusual thing about the sentence, though, is that if you take out the word ‘respectively’ (meaning nothing at all here), you get a nice coordination: ‘1the high quality 2you will obtain 3will meet respectively 1the price that 2you pay’—although they’ve placed the phrase ‘the price that you pay’ in the more emphatic position at the end of the coordination, which feels quite ominous.

What really is ominous is that they’ve massaged the truth in telling us that they will refund any unhappy customers. Their Ts and Cs state that ‘refunds are only given in exceptional circumstances and at the discretion of the reviews team,’ which to me sounds awfully like ‘never’.

You get the point: the About page is a mess, and the site is a mess. I don’t merely want to poke fun, so I had a go at cleaning up the About section. Most of the work was just deleting redundancy. Voilà:

At Proofreading 247, we ensure writers get the credit they deserve, by enabling them to express themselves clearly and accurately. We especially want to help those from developing countries. Whatever problems you have, we are here to help you out!

We reliably provide an effective service and full satisfaction with our fixed guarantees and experienced proofreaders:

• Our proofreaders are native English speakers who hold at least a Masters or PhD, and who have extensive university teaching and examining experience.
• We guarantee that your document will be proofread by the time you state in the order form. With our automated submission process, we can start correcting your essay right away and get it back to you in as little as 24 hours.
• Our competitive prices are based on the word count of your document and how soon you want it processed. If any aspect of our service leaves you dissatisfied we will refund your money or proofread your document again for free.
• We respect your privacy, and will never disclose any of your information.

It’s hardly perfect and it's a little flat on salesmanship, but it’s more-or-less serviceable. It did take a while though, which suggests to me that if Proofreading 247 ever decides to proofread their own website they have quite a job on their hands. I would suggest binning most of the drivel that they link to at the bottom (under vacuous titles like ‘More Useful Information’ and ‘Useful Stuff’), and smartening up key the pages linked to at the top (‘About’, ‘Pricing’ etc. … speaking of which, three of those links take you to the same place). They could make a good start just by deleting all the repeated material.

One last comment. They write, ‘Unlike most other custom writing services, we provide native speaking writers to our North American customers. You can be sure that you will not receive a paper written by Pakistani writer with poor language skills.’ And so just condemnation was heaped on incompetent Pakistani proofreaders, proofreaders so unskilled that they’d never think to make a jingoistic comment like the one above, in the same breath they made a blooper like ‘native speaking writers’. Good heavens. It in these moments of adept hypocrisy that Proofreading 247 really reaches its highest potential.

Postmodernism [Caputo, 2006]

[Source: John D. Caputo, chapter 5 of Philosophy and Theology (Abingdon Press, 2006)]

Summary

Postmodernism isn’t relativism or skepticism. Rather it’s a sense that:

• Our perspectives, vocabularies, and paradigms necessarily shape our thought. We get somewhere in thinking not by ridding ourselves of those things, but by developing and reconfiguring them.
• Because of the world’s vast complexity, we are incredulous at totalising metanarratives (theories that claim to be the final word). We need to attend closely to the details, for it’s the details—like anomalies in science—that challenge our paradigms, languages and perspectives, and push us to develop new ones.
• Pure reason isn't the only way to understand the world. Intuition, grace, faith and art shed light on it too.

The Postmodern Turn.

1. The hermeneutical turn. We’re not objective, neutral observers, but are steeped in presuppositions. We get somewhere not by ridding ourselves of presuppositions, but by using our intuitions to help us reform our present ones.
• Heidegger, influenced by Kierkegaard, argued that when we look at something we must always see it in the light of the presuppositions we inherit, because it is we who are looking at it. We can’t look from a ‘neutral’ standpoint, because we can’t look through anyone’s eyes but our own.
• These presuppositions don’t blind us, but give us access to the world. They give shape to the stimuli and data of the world we encounter, and so give us an angle into it. From a ‘neutral’ perspective the world, a perspective without presuppositions, the world is an incomprehensible swirling mess. We get somewhere not by ridding ourselves of presuppositions, but by developing and transforming them.
2. The linguistic turn. We need language to think, but all language is steeped in prejudices. We get somewhere not by trying to reject language, but by finding ways of saying things better.
• Descartes attempted in his Meditations to presume nothing, but missed that the words he was using were ones he’d inherited from others, and therefore inherently came with presumptions. As Wittgenstein said, there’s no private language: all language is public, and is loaded with public presuppositions, prejudices, and tendencies—ingrained grooves that carry you in certain directions.
• Wittgenstein argued that the best way to deal with language’s prejudices is not to rid ourselves of language, since without language we can’t think. Instead, we get somewhere by coming up with new, more complex, more nuanced vocabularies—like Heidegger, who coined a new vocabulary to express his new ideas, and deliberately avoided words like ‘consciousness’ that had too much freight.
3. The revolutionary turn. Under settled paradigms we can be objective and dispassionate, but when paradigms are in flux we get somewhere by employing our intuition and feelings.
• Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) claimed that scientists do not merely passively record information but also actively project a framework or paradigm onto the data. ‘Paradigms’ are overarching frameworks that constitute our best way of making sense of all the data we have, and dictate what sorts of data should be collected and how.
• Khun also claimed that scientists not are pure, unimpassioned observers but flesh-and-blood people with hunches, intuitions, and feelings. His talk of intuition and hunches did not mean he was against reason but that he understood ‘reason’ to mean ‘having good reasons’, not having pure and incontrovertible Reason or a piece of eternity in your pocket. This suggested that one could understand the world not only by pure reason, but also by faith, grace, and art. Neither did the presence of intuitions mean that scientists couldn’t be objective, but rather that objectivity is the sort of thing you get only when science is being practiced under a settled paradigm.
• New paradigms unsettle old ones when scientists discover an anomaly so intractable that they have to totally rethink their framework. This revolution mostly proceeds seemingly against the ‘evidence’, and by the spark of hunch and intuition. One joins the revolution when one ‘gets’ the new paradigm or ‘sees it’—i.e. intuits that it’s right. Often the last to get the new paradigm are the old and tenured. They have been with the old paradigm for such a long time that they can’t separate the data from the old interpretation of it, and as far as they’re concerned all the ‘evidence’ points to the old paradigm. The new paradigm only takes over when they are shouted down, retire, or join the revolution—a revolution as full of feelings and instinct as an artistic or political revolution.

Incredulity at Meta-Narratives

• The Postmodern Condition (1977) Lyotard defined the postmodern as ‘incredulity to meta-narratives’ (grands récits, ‘big stories’)—totalising, overarching stories which say that life is ‘nothing but’ displaced love for your mum (Freud), or that history is ‘nothing but’ the unfolding of the absolute spirit (Hegel). Enough of these ‘nothing buts’, said Lyotard: our interpretations of the world will always be too simplistic to fully account for our world’s vast complexity.

• Lyotard didn’t say ‘refutation of meta-narratives’, because that would have implied that he had an even bigger story. He simply said these big stories had become incredible, and we’d grown incredulous.

Theological Implications

• Postmodernism need not lead to relativism or skepticism. Nevertheless, from a religious perspective, postmodernism does imply that God’s point of view is reserved for God, while the human standpoint is immersed in a multiplicity of angles.

"Interpret the Bible like any other book?" Requiem for an axiom [Moberly, 2012]

[Source: Moberly, R. W. L., '"Interpret the Bible like Any Other Book"? Requiem for an Axiom', Journal of Theological Interpretation, 4.1, 2010, 91-110]

Summary

• The axiom ‘interpret the Bible like any other book’ upholds some good exegetical values, but it should be abandoned because the axiom (1) is dated and does not help us face contemporary challenges, (2) has a crude view of reading and books, and (3) is rooted in dubious ideology that unreasonably excludes religious commitments.

Observations about the axiom

The axiom’s history.

• Spinoza articulated this sort of principle as early as 1670, but Jowett’s statement of the axiom is the most famous (in Essays and Reviews, 1860). Jowett was concerned that his Christian contemporaries were obscuring the Bible’s true character through fanciful and undisciplined interpretation. He sought to prevent such skewed interpretations by bracketing out theological commitments with the axiom, ‘interpret the Scripture like any other book’ (1860: 458). Interpreting the Bible by ‘the same rules of evidence and the same canons of criticism’ alone (1860: 455) would allow its character to be seen afresh.
• Few scholars mention the axiom today, but this is probably because it’s so entered the scholarly bloodstream. Nevertheless, with the paradigms of biblical study in something of a flux at present, some are deliberately reaffirming the old axiom (e.g. Barton 2007, The Nature of Biblical Criticism).

The axiom is more complicated to implement consistently than Jowett and others have probably appreciated.

• E.g. scholars who support the axiom have nevertheless referred to Israel/the Church’s deity as ‘God’, unlike other deities whom they refer to as ‘god[s]’.

The axiom is ideological.

• Enlightenment ideological dichotomies—state and church, scholarship/science and religion, public and private—exclude any personal commitments, including religious ones, from the academy. The axiom lines up perfectly with the ideology of the Enlightenment: it is not merely a helpful piece of received wisdom, even if it's sometimes presented so.
• Christians need to simultaneously study the Bible both academically and religiously. This is because Christians believe that the Bible contains definitive truth, and that this truth must be rearticulated/’applied’ in every generation. Religiously engaged interpretation seeks to do just that. To best articulate the Bible’s truth, it needs to employ both the resources of Christian theology, tradition and history and also modes of academic reading. Hence Christians must to seek to study the Bible academically, and to employ their religious commitments in the academy. The axiom debars this, stopping Christians bringing religious commitments into their academic study.
• In practice, the axiom’s ideology is cited polemically to to distance biblical study in the academy specifically from theological commitments, but not other commitment (e.g. marxist, feminist). This is because religious commitments are thought to particularly distort interpretation.

Too few have thought seriously (if at all) about the axiom, its implications or an alternative to it.

The value of the axiom.

It is valuable because it ensures the use of general hermeneutics, and precludes special hermeneutics or special pleading of any kind. For example:

• The Biblical languages should be understood by the standard rules of philology and grammar. The NT was not written in ‘Holy Ghost Greek’.
• The Biblical writers expressed themselves in the literary genres of their time, and these genres can be illuminated by comparisons with nonbiblical literature. ‘Holy Scripture’ is not itself a literary genre.

Reasons the axiom should be abandoned.

The axiom is old, and not relevant for contemporary challenges.

• Theological thinking has radically changed since then. Brevard Childs, for instance, thinks theological commitments should not even affect exegesis, but be affected by it, which would have sounded strange to 19th c. conservative ears.
• Social and ecclesial contexts have radically changed too, from Enlightenment Christendom to a post-Christian secular and pluralist context. The axiom really has nothing helpful to say about the relationship between biblical study and religious perspectives in this new context.

The axiom’s ideology claims that it is necessary that Christians leave aside religious commitments in academic biblical study. It is not.

• For someone to suppress their commitments, as the Enlightenment requires, is to suppress their identity and lose their personal integrity.
• The Bible has a privileged place in academic study—it receives vastly more attention than, say, other ancient Near Eastern texts. This is because of the belief that the Bible’s truth needs rearticulating in a way that those other texts don’t, and that to do that one needs the aid of academic tools. However, because the axiom obviates rearticulating the Bible’s truth, one is left with no reason to study the Bible in the academy any more than other ANE texts.
• It is wrongheaded to use the axiom to eliminate religious commitments exclusively for fear that they particularly skew interpretation. It has not been shown that religiously-minded interpretation is inherently skewing; neither has it been shown that other perspectives have any less potential to skew interpretation.

The axiom has a crude view of reading, of books, and of the Bible’s differences from other books.

• The axiom implies that acts of reading books are all the same, but they’re not.

• Books vary endlessly in every way.
• One may read for numerous different purposes: pleasure, moral improvement, sociological research.
• One can read in different ways: once skim-reading, or many times with careful diligence; for a transfer of information, or to savour and drink deeply of the text.
• It is unhelpful for the axiom to suggest we read the Bible like other books, because Bible is unlike other books.
• Even when Jews and Christians are in historical-critical mode they have vast differences of opinion on the interpretation of the OT, differences of opinion which are much bigger than with most other books.
• A number of books within the OT (e.g. Isaiah, the Pentateuch) comprise materials which have diverse authorship, provenance, and outlook. These larger wholes are unlike other books or anthologies because they are other than the sum of their parts.
• Christians use the Bible differently to other books. They read the Bible for their identity, ethics, worldview, and final hope. It is the essential ingredient in worship and liturgy, and everything is measured against it. There are few other books in which readers find their identity in such a full-orbed manner.

Abandoning the axiom.

• The axiom is valuable on a purely philological level, but is otherwise so flawed that we should not use it to make any substantial claim. Thus while we should uphold the positive aspects of the axiom, we should do that on grounds other than those of the axiom.
• Moberly does not intend to divorce religious and secular approaches, to prejudge the interrelationship between their approaches to the Bible, or to dictate how the Bible ought to be studied outside confessional contexts. Rather, he hopes that if we abandon the axiom, we will be free to find better ways to think about the study of the Bible within the humanities.