Official Doctrine Article Review

I really like it.

I didn’t do a thorough editing of every little grammatical issue, but the following are my quick suggestions:

1) “In the 19th century, temple goers were asked if they maintained proper fences to prevent their cows wonder into a neighbor’s field.”

Should read “. . . prevent their cows from wandering into . . .”.

2) GREAT Elder McConkie quote about books written by GA’s! (Just had to add that.)

3) “There’s lots of things many people erroneously believe are Official Doctrine.”

Should read “There are lots . . .”.

4) I would use “fobidden” instead of “verboten”. It sounds less pretentious in a general essay for everyone.

5) “The Church has a set of policy, procedures, pronouncements and pontifications go out to 14 million members.”

I would suggest, “The Church has a set of policies, procedures and pronouncements that go out to millions of members.” (Numerical figures will be out-of-date quickly.)

6) “She fretted about the impossibility to obedient.”

Should read, “. . . impossibility of being obedient.”

7) “Much of the perceived inconsistencies can be resolved by understanding that Church authorities have a unique stewardship. When they speak, they are talking to 14 million members in 160 different countries.”

Should read, “Much of the perceived inconsistency (or “Many of the perceived inconsistencies”) can be resolved by understanding that Church authorities have a unique stewardship. When they speak, they are talking to millions of members in many different countries.” (Keeps the statement timeless.)

“Nevertheless, we can’t just take a canned set of gospel fixes of the shelf to solve our problems.”

“of” should be “off”

Brian, which part of the bolded sentence at the beginning of my comment didn’t you understand? 😆 😈

I incorporated all your suggestions Ray. I have not heard back from Don in a week or so. I will do another pass through to look at grammar issues and then tell him I am publishing it unless I hear back in the next couple of days.

The beauty of online publishing is the ability to make future updates and clarifications easily. I think Don was being overly concerned about making it perfect before publishing.

Final Draft:

http://staylds.com/docs/drafts/OfficialDoctrine2010-02-24.htm” class=”bbcode_url”>http://staylds.com/docs/drafts/OfficialDoctrine2010-02-24.htm

I can’t get to the link for some reason. Perhaps you can email it to me? I’d love to take a look.

I’m on it! Thanks!

Sent to Euphemerus

I finalized with Don. I’m just going through the painful process of converting his MS Word doc into HTML. I am not comfortable posting the automatic export from within Word, it is full of a TON of Microsoft-specific tags and code.

All good points Euhemerus.

I went back and forth with Don a lot. He seems to have a perfectionist streak in his personality (which I can thoroughly understand), and wanted things to be certain ways. He changed back a lot of my edits. The overall tone is much more “TBM” in a lot of ways than I would have liked, had I no restrictions. In the end, I let go and let it be Don’s work. This is his article and I am just an editor. I want it to be him shining through, and let him have his voice in the piece.

Actually, If there’s some juicy points like that in the article, ones open for debate and discussion, it will encourage response from the readers.

I can tell you what Don would probably say about the Temple Recommend questions as dogma. He would say those are not canonized, so they are not official doctrine, and thus not dogmatic. It’s a stretch, because Mormonism does have dogma, but our dogma is like good ‘ole fashioned greased pig contest. Which of us farmers can really grab a hold of it without it slipping right out of our hands?