Keep Up the Good Work!

  The Post reporter asked me recently to write a 'Monitoring' column for the their magazine 멦he Dongguk Post? I do have to repeat, however, that I was very impressed with the quality of the Dec. 8 issue. I know how difficult it is to write in a foreign language, and the quality of the English was, I thought, very high.  The articles were also very interesting; I especially liked the articles 'Fond Memories of Dongguk' and 'In Defense of Academic Freedom.'? Our newspaper, the JoongAng Daily, covered the controversy over Kang Jeong-gu, of course, and I thought Lee Seon-a's article did a good job of presenting the case for academic freedom.  For what it's worth, I agree with the thought that academic freedom is crucial at universities. I also enjoyed the adventures of Professor Kang not because I agree with him, but because it seemed to me he was very obviously having fun in the media spotlight.  But there is some criticism about this magazine. Even though the magazine is good, it could be better with some consistent editing. There are many different styles a publication can adopt, but they should be consistent in articles. One example is subheads in a story. Some headings have every word capitalized, others are all lower case except for the first word, and others are mixed (Page 12: 'One Scholar's Comments can have a big impact on Society and the University'). Editors should decide how they want to capitalize and stick with it. They should also capitalize all proper names and not capitalize common nouns. On Page 4, there is a reference in the 'Open Sesame' column to 'a building named temporary library.' If that is its proper name, it should have been 'Temporary Library.  Some grammar problems escaped the editors?notice. I shouldn't be too critical, because that happens at our newspaper too.   Subject-verb agreement is an occasional problem. On Page 7 are two examples: 'What if you don't have very much experiences?' and 'What does the foreign companies see.'  One last comment, on the elections and the cartoon. On Page 4, your news story says Mr. Jung and Mr. Woo were both named 'chairpersons.' (Ugh  I hate that word.) On Page 14 and in the cartoon, you call them chairperson and vice chairperson. Hmm.. It's a reporter's job to get the facts right, but it's an editor's job to catch obvious problems like that one.  But the magazine is interesting to read, and because I know how difficult English writing is for a non-native speaker, I am very impressed with the writing quality. Keep up the good work!