Prepositions, "Ases", and the Weird and Wacky (IID)

Part IIA gave you an overview of the kinds of deficiencies we see in Harriet’s use of the English language, particularly focusing on incorrect words and compound words.

Part IIB, examined the application of singulars and plurals, verb tenses, and redundancies in a cross-section of Klausner’s reviews.

Part IIC talked about Harriet’s problems with pronouns and possessives and how she interchanges nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs.

This section studies prepositions; use of the word “as”; sentences without subjects or verbs, or both; and sentences that are just too strange to call much of anything.

Prepositions became a very interesting study. In looking at their overuse and wrong choice of prepositions, we discover that prepositions tend to derail Harriet’s sentence structures, sending her off on little adventures in creative English.  Oh, those pesky little two, three, and four letter words!  Pay attention, because some of them are very funny.

Harriet’s Wording	Correct Wording
an intriguing biography that combines knowledge obtained from family correspondence mostly written by the upper class heroine with the state of Victorian art and aristocratic history.	an intriguing biography that combines knowledge obtained from family correspondence mostly written by the upper class heroine about the state of Victorian art and aristocratic history.
The ensemble cast to include the lead trio,	The ensemble cast including the lead trio
they use every legal technique known to the American economy to reduce costs to as close to ground zero as possible	they use every legal technique known to the   American economy to reduce costs as close to ground zero as possible
as both prefer the attraction just go away	as both prefer that  the attraction would just go away
Complex as the audience learns much about Aaron, Dorothy and their marriage, as love does not denote happiness and camaraderie, as it can be destructive as well as constructive.	Complex as the audience learns much about   Aaron, Dorothy and their marriage.  Love does not denote happiness and camaraderie since it can be  both destructive and constructive.
she finds his caring of his family nice	she finds his caring for his family nice
she has an innate knack of knowing when someone makes something up	she has an innate knack  for knowing when someone makes something up
Jessica decides to take a stroll in the beach	Jessica decides to take a stroll on the beach
his boorishness is caused by his love at first sight of her leaving him unable to speak	his boorishness is caused by love at first sight leaving him unable to speak
On Atlantis God as with its predecessors, he succeeds.	In Atlantis God, as with its predecessors, he succeeds.
as the highest ranked female cop on the Kansas City, Missouri police department	as the highest ranked female cop in the Kansas City, Missouri police department
A professional with passion on the job	A professional with passion for the job
the trio want to do what is best to the child	the trio wants to do what is best for the child
In return for saving his life Coyote asks Atticus reciprocate.	In return for saving his life, Coyote asks Atticus “to” reciprocate
assault  for	assault “on”
Darlene and CPA Brad Henderson relocate the family from Houston for Round Top	Darlene and CPA Brad Henderson relocate the family from Houston to Round Top
temptation in the father of a student surfaces has Darlene considering what she never thought in all her years of marriage.	temptation in the form of a student’s father has Darlene considering what she never thought “of” in all her years of marriage.
the Rogers' home was burglarized with their artifacts.	the Rogerses’ home was burglarized “for” their artifacts.
a horde of like him will descent on Luther's Bend	a similar horde will descend on Luther’s Bend
she struggles with her ethics as to doing the right thing	she struggles with her ethics over  doing the right thing
Elise LeRoy the Oscar winning Otherworld actress receives a threatening letter signed by blood drops	Elise LeRoy, the Oscar winning Otherworld   actress, receives a threatening letter in blood drops
what made humanity unique is compassion for the nurturing of others	what made humanity unique is compassion and the nurturing of others
understanding his agency's mantra is the opposite of the marines with "left behind".	understanding his agency’s mantra is opposite to the Marines’ “Left Behind”.
In remittance to his being saved from eternal   torment	In remittance for being saved from eternal from
a rare look inside the Missionary of Charity especially Mary Johnson's work as Sister Donata alongside of Mother.	a rare look inside the Missionary of Charity, especially Mary Johnson’s work as Sister Donata alongside Mother.
he travels to the Isle of Jago to probe the archbishop's homicide.	he travels to the Isle of Jago to probe into the archbishop’s homicide.
The Jedi and the sibling follow leads into the heart of the perilous Hutts in which crime lords rule.	The Jedi and the sibling follow leads into the heart of the perilous Hutts where crime lords rule.
Sir James Smiley, Esq. sends a letter to Thea Martin asking for her to come see him.	Sir James Smiley, Esq., sends a letter to Thea Martin asking her to come see him.
the tree fell in his chest.	the tree fell on his chest.
His plan is to leave the enforcement business which he is unaware of that one just does not retire from the Ozark mob	Unaware that one just does not retire, his plan is to leave the enforcement business.
a powerful timely thriller with applications in our society.	a powerful, timely thriller with application to our society
filled with remorse with what he is doing to David behind his back	filled with remorse over what he is doing to David behind his back
Grandpa Atherton steals the show of this fast-paced whodunit	Grandpa Atherton steals the show in this fast-paced whodunit
James hires Cat to help him with his outside of baseball business activities.	James hires Cat to help him with his external baseball business activities.
he turns in to a Pixie due to Chicory's magic	he turns into a Pixie due to Chicory’s magic
He sort of as sees her frequently at the station	He sees her frequently at the station
a wonderful tale of a couple still in love as they were in their Aggie days	a wonderful tale of a couple as much in love as they were in their Aggie days.
to work as a lifeguard and teacher of young children at the local pool alongside of David.	to work as a lifeguard and teacher of young   children at the local pool alongside David.
Kathy Cooke assigns her Red Cell duo to uncover out why the China leaders feel immune	Kathy Cooke assigns her Red Cell duo to uncover why China leaders feel immune
She demands Benjamin's widow Mary to tell her the truth with no omissions or deceptions.	She demands that Benjamin’s widow Mary tell her the truth with no omissions or deceptions.
he cannot grant to her what she covets	he cannot grant her what she covets

We’re going to examine Hattie’s overuse of the word “as”.  It’s a tiny word with lots of different meanings, but it’s Klausner’s go-to word for just about everything.  It is one of the many reasons that her sentences become garbled, irritating, or impossible to follow.

•	Complex as the audience learns much about Aaron, Dorothy and their marriage, as love does not denote happiness and camaraderie, as it can be destructive as well as constructive.
•	Grandpa Atherton steals the show of this fast-paced whodunit as he and his granddaughter team up as mall sleuths
•	she struggles with her ethics as to doing the right thing
•	Rike arrives accusing Joarr of losing the chalice as disaster has struck their race as he explains the young are dying
•	On Atlantis God as with its predecessors, he succeeds.
•	Harold is terrific as he deals with immense pressure as he expects his destiny is death, but remains steadfast on his quest as he knows in the end he must go it alone.

Finally, we near the end with the last category—Weird and Wacky.  These are examples of strings of words that are too bizarre to fit anywhere else, but show a certain disconnect with the English language.

•	The third Quent dark fantasy (see The House On Durrow Street, and The Magicians and Mrs. Quent) super thriller with several stunning bit plausible twists.
•	The Westmann Islands near retired Inspector Lieffson suspect Markus,
•	While, the key players are fully developed so that the audience understands what motivates each of them.
•	Although a major sidebar detracts from the fun storyline, but fans will enjoy the latest escapedes of the Young Corinthians.
•	Now a widow with two sons (seven years old Jonathan and five years old Christopher) hopes instead that it is a lucrative matchmaking commission like the one she did for Peter Goodfellow.
•	However, the siblings' relationship and the life and times of the ABB in the late 1960s that haunt this winner especially the climatic death of Duane as the author portrays his feelings of survivor guilt.
•	Although his healing from what appears to be near crippling PTSD seems too miraculous but fans will enjoy their journey.

Well.  Wow.  Hmmmm.   Uh . . .   Hmmmmmm.   (Picking my jaw up from the floor.)  Let me take some time to gather myself because I just don’t know what to say.

Does this look like meeting the core standard of English writing, communication, and storytelling skills to you?   Worse yet, Klausner’s mad math skills make her English skills look like pure genius.  

Continue to Part III, Killing Me Softly with Your Review

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Klausner's Mad Math and Logic Skills (IV)

In Part 1, we examined Klausner's known work history and some of the requirements for earning a bachelors and masters degree in Library Sciences.

In Part 11, we looked at Klausner’s punctuation, grammar, and spelling errors; pronouns, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, redundancies, singulars and plurals, verb tenses; prepositions, possessives, and the weird and wacky.

In Part III, we reviewed Klausner’s writing, communication, and literacy skills.

This section investigates Klausner’s math and logic skills.  How do we do that?  Again, it’s very easy.  Numbers are the most logical and purest form of communication that we have.  They are absolute and are the foundation of science.  In the first grade, children are taught to add simple numbers like 1 + 1.  By the fourth grade, we have learned subtraction, multiplication, and division.

How do we apply this information to Klausner’s reviews and profiles?  We just look at the numbers she uses.

•	On Amazon, she says that she reads 2 books per day.
•	On Book Crossing.com she says she reads 2-3 books per day.
•	In Time Magazine, she is quoted as reading 4-6 books per day.
•	Wired Online Magazine reports Klausner as writing 2 reviews per day.
•	On All Readers.com she says she reviews 3-4 books per day.
•	On Amazon, her review average is 7 books per day.

Nothing quite adds up in those statements.

Now let’s go look inside her reviews.  What do we find there?  Let’s start with basic addition:

2 + 1 = 4	Harriet says that Holt, Max, and Mira are a quartet.
1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 3	Harriet says that "three girls begin singing".  They are:  Penn, Thea, Arista, and Alexi.
2 + 4 + 2 = 4	Harriet characterizes Amalie, Oliver, Michael, Eve, Shane, Claire, and at least two vampires as “the Glass House quartet”.
1 + 4 = 4	Burke and Sergeant Moore, Clayton Manning, Tesla protégé, and Professor Dan Richards.

How does one graduate from the first grade without being able to count to 8?

Here, an author says that Harriet got the number of pack members in her book wrong.  Harriet said there were 13 pack members.  Apparently, there weren’t.

Now we make the easy transition to logic.  Logic, in some way, means making order out of chaos.   But it appears that we have someone who brings chaos out of order.

Inexplicably, we have the placement of the years 1886  and 1896 in the 1990s.  This novel, according to Harriet’s review begins in 1886; yet she concludes her review by stating that it occurs in the last decade of the 1900s (“the twentieth century”).

Harriet places 1922 after the end of World War II (1945, 1951, or 1955, depending on which event historians cite).

In another review, Harriet mentions the “1500s”, “the 1940s” and  “1949”, but says the book addresses questions from the 1930s and 1912.

Numbers are a beautiful thing!

Continue to Section V, "What's Ethics Got to Do With It?"

Return to "A Reviewer with a Masters in Library Sciences".

What's Ethics Got to Do With It? (V)

In Part I, we discussed some of what it takes to earn a Masters’ Degree in Library Sciences and we touched on some of Klausner’s work as a librarian.

In Part II, we looked at Klausner’s punctuation, grammar, and spelling errors

Part III talked about Harriet’s communication and storytelling skills.

Part IV took on her math and logic skills.

This section is about intellectual property law and ethics.  A candidate for a Masters in Library Sciences must pass intellectual property law and ethics courses as part of the undergraduate degree requirements before moving on to the masters level work.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that a student is required to demonstrate this training in their daily lives, but merely to be familiar with and understand it well enough to pass the tests

Intellectual Property Law:

Very simply, intellectual property law is the law that governs copyright, trademarks, and patents.  It is designed to protect an individual’s or entity’s rights to own their creative works and prohibits anyone else from using those works without permission.^1-3  It is designed to discourage the theft of, or profit from, another person’s creative works.

Why would intellectual property laws be required coursework for a librarian?  It would be safe to say that all books, magazines, and publications are copyrighted.  Libraries deal with the written word and they are bound to purchase legitimately printed materials and not bootlegged materials.  Consequently, they have to receive training in this area.  In addition, librarians have access to a great deal of published and copyrighted information and they need training in the consequences of breaking the laws related to the dissemination of the material or its unauthorized reproduction.

The training should instill in students a healthy respect for the law.  It is also designed to fully train students on copyright law and plagiarism.

Plagiarism is not only taught as part of middle school English classes, but high school and college instructors particularly investigate students' written papers for it.  They view plagiarism as such as serious violation that it is the same a cheating and they will fail the student on their paper for that reason.  Even with all this early and ongoing awareness, plagiarism is irrevocably tied to intellectual property law because it violates copyright law.  Clearly, an author who steals another’s idea or works is a plagiarizer and is liable for court sanctions.

How is this connected to Harriet’s reviewing career?  As a reviewer, Harriet liberally steals from dustjackets, editorial materials, and other reviews, many times word for word, to craft her reviews in spite of her formal, educational training to the contrary.

	1http://unitproj.library.ucla.edu/col/bruinsuccess/01/01.cfm
	2www.alllaw.com/topics/intellectual_property
	3http://www.hg.org/intell.html

Federal Laws Regarding Federal Trade Commission Requirements  (16 CFR 255)

Closely tied to intellectual property law are the Federal Trade Commission’s laws regarding disclosure.  Sneaky Burrito on this blog has written a brilliant discussion of the FTC requirements for disclosing the receipt of free products when writing reviews.

The Federal Trade Commission says, in Example 8, that, if a reviewer is part of a network marketing program and receives free products about which the reviewer can voluntarily write reviews, a positive review would be considered an endorsement and a disclosure of receipt of the product for free is required.  It goes on to say, in 16 CFR 255.5 that the reviewer must disclose the connection with the seller when the readers of the endorsement will most likely not anticipate their connection.

Almost all of the books that Harriet reviews are received free from authors, publishers, editors, and Amazon.  Yet, not once does she make her legally required disclosures about free product.

Harriet willfully breaks the law.

Amazon’s Review Policy:

Among other things, Amazon’s review policy requires:  “Full disclosure: If you received a free product in exchange for your review, please clearly and conspicuously disclose that that you received the product free of charge.  . . .”

Harriet’s refusal to disclose that she receives free product is a violation of Amazon’s reviewing policy.

Ethics:

Ethics comes from a place that is more intangible than tangible.  It’s connected with laws, right and wrong, and morality.  But, it’s really more about character and about saying and doing the right thing in all circumstances for the sake of doing the right things.  Ethics come from an internal place and not from external influences.

Do we see Harriet’s ethics in her profiles and her reviews?  Absolutely.

Harriet is not an honest person.  See “The Lies that Bind Klausner” for a full discussion of the lies that she has perpetuated across the internet.  There, not only does she says that she would never use more than one profile because it’s just too much work (obviously the voice of experience speaking), but you can see the discrepancies and lies in each.  In the Amazon.co.uk profile, she lists herself as Amazon No. 1 Reviewer, and yet that wasn’t true for the Amazon.co.uk site.  In her second Amazon.co.uk. profile, she says she was born and lived most of her life in Europe and came to the United States in 1991 when, in actuality, she was born and raised in the United States and never lived anywhere else.

Harriet doesn’t read the books she reviews.  (Reading is Not Necessary to Harriet’s Reviews.) She actually makes up things that didn’t occur in books and puts the false information in her reviews.

Klausner, in violation of the industry’s guidelines, and possibly other agreements, resells the free copies of the books she receives under her son’s name on Half.com.  This is a huge indicator that she knows it’s wrong, but she does it anyway.

Klausner has rated 99.7% of the books that she reviews as 4 stars or higher on Amazon.  Orson Welles indicated that the possibility of a reviewer’s liking a book is about .5% to 2-3%.  Maybe Welles was a bit more critical than most because most reviewers say that the average of good books is about 5-10%.  In Harriet, we have a total aberration from the norm.

Another ethical issue is that of Harriet's putting up, on a public website, reviews full of vulgar words, crass euphemisms, and pornographic language where a child of any age can see them.  This isn’t just bad judgment; this is indicative, at a minimum, of a diminished standard of public decency.

Conclusion:

What we have then is a lawbreaker, a policy breaker, a liar, and a cheater.

Is there anything ethical about this?  No.  Oh, hell, no.

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