Christine Blasey Ford’s letter to Feinstein contains 14 glaring errors for anyone with a PhD

Natural News [link only] | September 25, 2018 | Mike Adams

[MarMema]

but. When I am writing a letter of that degree of importance, I am very careful to go back over and over it and make the necessary corrections.

[MarMema]

who’s only hope for a PhD would be to get one from a much less demanding major,

Another site is reporting she is not a registered psychologist so maybe she got this online - one of those ones where you use experience mostly and lots of money.

[Faith]

https://www.dangerous.com/49836/records-show-dr-ford-is-not-a-licensed-psychologist-may-have-committed-perjury/

[AndyJackson]

Obviously neither of them is >> eminently qualified <<<

I found this article rather off-putting and one that probably does far more harm than good. I would hope no one is suckered into believing that this demonstrates someone besides Blasey Ford wrote the article, because it doesn't. That is the kind of forensic analysis that is way beyond this author's "paygrade" to use her own words. The writing is perhaps less formal than the author might have liked when writing to a Senator on a serious subject, but that is a personal choice and is not an indication that Blasey Ford was not the author. In fact the informality and errors -to the extent there are errors - give the letter a degree of superficial credibility it would not have if it went through central typing and technical editing.

The principal job of a good technical editor is to be an excellent surrogate reader for the author to help guide the author in composing a technical article to make her point as clearly and succinctly as possible. In my experience as a PhD physicist, holding positions requiring extensive technical writing, I have had the joy of working with exactly one truly great technical editor. I have worked with a couple who were helpful, a few who were boarder-line competent and a number who were actually incompetent, but were necessary bureaucratic roadblocks to get past. I would put this author in the boarder-line competent category, at best.

The problem is that this author confuses what is grammar, what is syntax, what is typography, what is composition and what is personal style.

Let us go through some examples:

1. "in evaluating" vs "to evaluating." The error the author makes is easily illustrated by rewriting the sentence she quotes “I am writing with information relevant in evaluating the current nominee to the Supreme Court.” If you reorder this to "In evaluating the current nominee to the Supreme Court I am writing with relevant information." You could not use "to" here because the preposition "to" is driven by the adjective relevant. While the shift in meaning is subtle and not important, it is a different perspective. "In" in this case sets the time, manner and place of the activity, e.g. "under the circumstance where you are evaluating..." which is what the committee is doing and which is what Blasey Ford is referring to.
2. 1980's vs 1980s - no not every PhD would spot this obvious error because it is so common that our eyes pass over it. It is typographical, irrelevant to deep meaning.
3. The strange capitalization of “High School.” The punctuation police will be all over this and they are wrong. As an example one writes "the President" referring to the President of the United States. The Constitution says so, while the punctuation police will say no, but President is a proper name or title of address to a particular person. Likewise with high school. If her perspective is that this is a proper [truncated] name for a particular high school, then you can't argue with her point of view. As the author asserts “Marjory Stoneman-Douglas High School” is correct. Further reference to this school as the High School, would be correct. Sure, a good editor would probably turn the majiscules to miniscules, but it is a bit arbitrary and conventional.
4. "Than me" vs "than myself." While there is a slight grammatical transgression here, the author overlooks a huge problem in this particular case. The author is wrong because the correct case for the pronoun is nominative and would correctly be "than I" or "than I myself." But these sound egocentric and thus the colloquial tendency is to say "than me." Than myself is wrong because myself is either reflexive, which it is not here, or it is an intensifier for I, and you cannot drop the I in that case. So, Blasey Ford here is a bit colloquial, but this is standard incorrect usage rather than just shear illiterate error of the kind the author commits in trying to correct Blasey Ford.
5. “that included me and 4 others” vs “that included myself and four others.” The author is wrong. "Included" is a verb takes the objective case and "me" is properly objective case. Myself is not a pronoun, but either a reflexive pronoun (I will shoot myself in frustration over the Senate's bumbling actions), or as an emphatic modifier, e.g., (I myself believe that Blasey lacked candor.)
6. "I feared he may inadvertently kill me” vs “I feared he might inadvertently kill me.” - This is one of my real hobby horses. "Might" is right here, but for the wrong reason. It has nothing to do with present vs past tense, but rather it is properly in the subjunctive mode expressing speculation, doubt or uncertainty vs certainty. The problem is that the grammar police dispensed with the subjunctive mode in English long ago. It's still there, but it isn't taught and is too often regarded by the ignorant as an error. And if it is understood that the present subjunctive of "may" is "may" then "may" could be correct here, suggesting speculation that there was an imminent probability that "he may injure me" rather than the remoter possibility that he "might."
7. “drunken” vs "drunk" - another thing the grammar police have done is tried to strip "strong" verbs from our language. Drunken is from old english, german and is the past participle of drink, being used as an adjective. "What do you do with a drunken sailor." Sure there is also an adjectival form "drunk," but that does not make "drunken" wrong. In fact it indicates Blasey Ford probably went to better schools than the author did.
8. "scrapped" vs "fought" - the author shows her shear ignorance. Drunken Aussies are famous for bar scraps, which is noise and bravado, a bit of a rough and tumble wrestling. A real knock down drag out "fight"with round house punches to the jaw knocking teeth out and breaking noses is a different matter.
9. Failure to capitalize "I" - don't be silly, You insult your own intelligence with this one. It's a typo, not a deliberate error of ignorance. One of the best writers in the English language, WFB, was famous for typographic errors in emails.
10. Fear of flying - lying is not a grammatical error. It is a moral error.
11. The font size is altered - I hate to say it but as I copy and paste and rearrange document with modern auto formatting, templates and format definitions I find strange things happening to types and font sizes all the time. It is maddening as hell. Try in this day and age setting Times New Roman font size 12 universally for a document. You can't do it anymore without far more computer set up time than the task is probably worth.

    In conclusion, this author is a poor editor, focused on trivia rather than clear meaning, immune to nuances of meaning, and ignorant of basic language skills. She must be viewed as a real nuisance by anyone trying to get something published through her.

[bgill]

Dannielle Blumenthal should analyse the handwritten statement Ford wrote at the polygraph.

[bgill]

If Fineswine admitted they found her in a homeless tent city, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.

[bgill]

Maybe this will convince you. Notice the signature. She is known as "Christine" or "Chrissy" but it is signed "Christy" and the "e" is missing from "Blasey". This appears to be written by a 12 year old boy.

[bgill]

Many profs slap their names onto their graduate students’ work.

[bgill]

Maybe she slept her way to a PhD.

[bgill]

Who vacations at a funeral?

[Ozark Tom]

Also no medical board certification to be found???

[Ozark Tom]

After her testimony, Stanford scrubbed her page. Merely says affiliate now, not psychologist.

[ataDude]

I was going to say the same thing but... I’m not an expert. I’m good... but not an expert. The improper use of me/myself/I always rings my alarm bells.

[YogicCowboy]

An apostrophe is better reserved for denoting possession or contraction.

Since a numeral is not a contraction (nor an acronym), and does not connote possession, using the letter, s, without an apostrophe makes more sense.

[Flaming Conservative]

There’s a link on Liberty Daily, to a website called “Dangerous”, in which the article states that Christine Ford lied from the get go, by calling herself a psychologist, which is illegal if you are not licensed as such. And she is NOT.

[Songcraft]

"They give out doctorates for baking cookies, for Pete's sake."

PhD Cookies?

[Kickaha]

I wondered if any voice recording of her have survived the Memory-Hole. I’m interested in lectures, local TV interviews, her screaming bloody murder at an abortion or anti-Trump rally. Anything that would contrast with the seven year old girl we heard yesterday.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

I think this is a stupid post. She wasn’t writing to be published or to be graded.

Part of me agrees. OTOH

when people write Senators, they tend to compose letters at their highest writing skill. Christine Blasey Ford’s writing skills are far above the skill level demonstrated in the letter released by Sen. Feinstein.

In addition, the article links to Dr. Ford’s published oeuvre. And, while I haven’t followed that link, the mere thought focuses my mind, at least, on what I would expect to see. And the Feinstein letter ain’t it.

There are enough real issues with lack of evidence or her memory of the event to not have to stoop to criticizing her grammar.

Yes, and the testimony of the good doctor before the committee was also not the kind of presentation presence one thinks of when one hears, “professor.”

I’m so confused . . .

[maggief]

Is it possible, Rachel Mitchell, the Arizona prosecutor, was laying the groundwork for the new FBI investigation?

If so, it’s genius.

[luckystarmom]

That’s what I picked up on. Made her seem less credible to me.