From an email to Priya Venkatesan’s students, who wonder whether they should hire lawyers in anticipation of a lawsuit against them by their writing professor. The author of the email is the dean of first-year students at Dartmouth.
Most of you have seen and/or heard that the Dartmouth Review and The Dartmouth have articles and blogs about the emails that you have received. There [Should be Their.] interest and publication may result in other media becoming interested as well. Should you be approached by any media for comment, you are certainly free to talk. Our advice would be, if you choose to do so, do so judiciously and/or with caution. You should also know that you are under no obligation to respond at all and this may be the best approach.
… Questions arose as to our ability to block Prof. Venkatesan’s emails. Whether that ability exists or not, it would not likely stop her emails from reaching your inbox given the dearth and ready availability of other free email systems [She means the opposite of dearth -- profusion, for instance, would work.] such as hotmail, gmail, and yahoo. If these emails are distressing, please don’t hesitate to forward them to me unopened. I would request you to forward any emails to me regardless of whether you read them or not so that I can be apprised of and assess how best to respond and support you. [Rewrite this final sentence for clarity, and to avoid wordiness: Please in any case forward all of her emails to me.]
At this point, as a good faith gesture, someone at Dartmouth should issue a reasonably lengthy, grammatically correct, statement to the press about the situation. Not because we need a statement, but because we need evidence that somewhere on campus are people who know how to write.
May 1st, 2008 at 8:20AM
Jeezis. Along with the plain howlers you point out, there are the gems of infelicity like "if you choose to do so, do so judiciously and/or with caution." Nice – repeat ‘do so’ for maximum inelegance, and what the hell is "judiciously and/or with caution" supposed to mean? One pictures students frowning anxiously over the choice between judiciously and with caution – oh which shall I choose – but then she does say I can use both. And then there’s "it would not likely stop her emails from reaching your inbox" which is pointlessly clunky.
And this is Dartmouth. Jeez.
May 1st, 2008 at 9:56AM
Yale art students. Dartmouth professors and administrators.
Makes me want to find some of those folks who called us NU Wildcats "Ivy League wannabes" and ask them to re-think their position.
May 7th, 2008 at 7:48PM
"would not likely stop"
split infinitive
"apprised of"
The preposition "of" has no object in this sentence.
May 7th, 2008 at 7:57PM
Marc: I’d be inclined to allow ‘would not likely stop’ – it’s more like a buried split infinitive or something, and it reads okay to me.
But you’re right on ‘apprised of’ — that whole sentence was such a wordy tangle that I didn’t explore it too closely. You strode bravely in.