Humble Pie, part one
One of my professors from Queen’s, Marek Martyniszyn, asked me to proofread a paper he plans to publish in the International & Comparative Law Quarterly. The pay isn’t great, but it’s kind of fun to reconnect with black letter law--now that I’ve put more than a year between me and Queen’s. Here’s his title:
FROM HESITATION INTO THE VANGUARD:
JAPANESE APPROACH TO EXTRATERRITORIALITY IN COMPETITION LAW ENFORCEMENT
Here’s my suggestion:
FROM BASHFUL TO BOLD:
JAPANESE APPROACH TO EXTRATERRITORIALITY IN COMPETITION LAW ENFORCEMENT
or FROM CONSERVATIVE TO CONFRONTATIONAL
or FROM RETICENT TO RECKLESS
I don’t know what he’ll make of these ideas but, to my ear, they are an improvement. I’m pretty sure his construction is ungrammatical. Of course alliteration is the refuge of unoriginal minds like mine... I’ve read stinging rebukes of alliteration on Facebook, so I realise it’s a bit of a crutch (What would I do without Facebook to tell me what is Not Cool?).
The humbling thing about proofreading is confronting how little I know about sentence construction. I’ve been a professional writer since 1984 and I really should have picked up a few tricks re. comma usage and understanding the relationship of one clause to another. I have always had good editors and proofreaders, so I’ve never really had to learn the rules. And now it would be really helpful... Aelish, one of Vanguard’s editors, sent me a link from The Economist re. comma usage and it helped. It suggested that the rules aren’t that rigid. But I found inconsistencies in my editing (sometimes the introductory clause seemed to need a comma and sometimes it didn’t, for instance, and I’m really confused about conjunctions and commas). I take assignments very seriously and I hope I didn’t botch it altogether. The following sentence would be one among many that I struggled with:
The European Commission— the EU’s law enforcer—as already in the 60s interpreted the relevant provisions of EU law, mute on their scope of application, as applicable to all arrangements affecting competition in the EU.
As edited:
Beginning in the 1960s, the European Commission—the EU’s law enforcer—interpreted the relevant provisions of EU law, which were mute on their scope of application, as being applicable to all arrangements affecting competition in the EU.
3-1