Fourth Edition

[Orencio Suhag]

Itis the product of significant revisions to clarify and elaborate on ways of implementing its recommendations of contextual hazard identification and risk management, through the establishment of health-based targets, catchment-to-consumer water safety plans and independent surveillance.

Updates in this latest edition reflect new evidence and further, provides additional explanations to support better understanding and application of the guidance. More details on the updates are included in the GDWQ preface.

Guidance has been updated on a number of chemicals: asbestos, bentazone, chromium, iodine, manganese, microcystins, nickel, silver, tetrachloroethene and trichloroethene. Guidance has also been added for chemicals not previously assessed in the Guidelines: anatoxin-a and analogues, cylindrospermopsins and saxitoxins. The new guidance on organotins has replaced the prior guidance focused on dialkyltins. With these updates, the guideline values for tetrachloroethene and trichloroethene have been revised while new guideline values for cylindrospermopsins, manganese, microcystins, and saxitoxins have been established .

Updated information on cyanobacteria has been included, introducing an alert level framework for early-warning and to guide short-term management responses. Guidance has also been updated in the sections on adequacy of water supply, climate change, emergencies, food production and processing, and radiological aspects, particularly on managing radionuclides when exceeding WHO screening values and guidance levels.

Previous editions of the Guidelines for drinking-water quality (including French and Spanish versions of the fourth edition incorporating the first addendum and Russian, Chinese and Japanese versions of the fourth edition)

Like the popular earlier editions, the fourth edition of A Lawyer Writes puts the reader in the place of a first-year attorney faced with real-life assignments. In doing so, it teaches law students not only how to succeed in law school, but also how to succeed in the practice of law. Using graphics and visual samples that demonstrate both effective and ineffective analytical techniques, this updated edition illustrates best practices for objective legal analysis and provides an overview of the transition from objective to persuasive writing.

The content and examples in the fourth edition have been supplemented, updated, and reorganized to provide an easy-to-use, step-by-step approach for learning legal analysis and objective writing. A Lawyer Writes aims to provide clear and concrete instruction about each facet of legal analysis, using the same order students will follow when performing the tasks in legal practice. The textbook also provides the relevant theory and background behind the choices attorneys make in their legal writing, enabling students to transfer those techniques to future settings. Speaking to its readers in a straightforward manner, A Lawyer Writes communicates essential skills and theories students can use throughout a lifetime of legal practice.

What follows is a detailed comparison of the fourth edition of William D. Mounce, Basics of Biblical Greek: Grammar (Zondervan, 2019) with its predecessor, the third edition (Zondervan, 2009). The goal is to probe whether and how an instructor should adopt the updated edition (BBG-4) or continue using the third (BBG-3).[1]

Its chief strength has always been how it targets an audience that likely has never learned another language and does not know English very well, either. Thus, it is masterful at easing students into the task of learning Greek.

But its limitations compared with other introductory grammars on the market are well-known: idiosyncratic sequencing,[2] weakness or over-simplification in certain grammatical areas,[3] use of the primary-secondary grid of verb endings while still not really moving away from paradigms/principal parts,[4] and (especially) less than accurate ways of teaching tense, aspect, and voice within the verbal system.

1) Stability in the essentials. BBG-4 does not make any major changes in the areas that would require instructors to make extensive changes to course materials. While there is fine-tuning along the way, the following elements are essentially unchanged:

Fortunately, BBG-4 makes good progress in becoming more current on tense and aspect. While Mounce still lands in the camp that holds that Greek does morphologize tense in the indicative, he has adopted different terminology for aspect and provides a longer and generally competent explanation in his overview of verbs (ch. 15).[6] In place of the old labels are those that most will find unobjectionable or, at least, easier to accommodate to their preferred method of teaching:

All told, the updates on tense and aspect are welcome and certainly will make teaching easier. One wishes, however, that they were more thoroughly applied and not (at points) a cosmetic change, which, due to inconsistent retention of past terminology, will still lead to confusion for students.

4) Refinements to the handling of glosses. BBG-4 does an admirable job in updating glosses for vocabulary words, particularly by introducing the use of semicolons to make more clear any differences in meaning or semantic fields for given words. In BBG-3, every gloss is separated by a comma; in BBG-4, many entries introduce a semicolon between meanings that are significantly different. Moreover, in select instances BBG-4 rearranges glosses or removes unnecessary information. For instance:

5) Improved handling of pronunciation. Though Mounce still endorses the Erasmian pronunciation of koine for instruction, he introduces the (neo-)modern pronunciation system at the outset (ch. 3) and integrates it into the updated software tools. This will make BBG-4 much more usable for those who have adopted the latter system as (arguably) more accurate to the first-century time period.

1) Less intuitive presentation of vocabulary. Throughout BBG-4 places more pronounced emphasis on roots and stems (especially for verbs). This, in turn, leads to subtle but impactful changes to how vocabulary words are displayed. In the new presentation, the lexical form appears to the left (as in BBG-3), but now on the same line to the right is not the list of glosses but, rather, the asterisked root or stem(s). The glosses appear below the stem/roots and are italicized. Let us compare the formats:

BBG-4 has also been reworked with a more contemporary style sheet, particularly in terms of headers. This yields a more polished product: gone is the chaotic mix of shaded headers, thick dotted lines, and so forth that gave BBG-3 a bit of a 1990s feel. There is, however, a downside. In the attempt to render a more sleek product, certain visual aides have been lost or become strangely less consistent, not more. In particular:

Finally, while the production quality of BBG-4 is solid on the whole, there appear to be significant issues in one particular area: the presentation of various noun/verb endings in blue font. The same practice was employed in BBG-3, with no issues. With BBG-4 the quality has decreased, whereby the vertical and horizontal alignment of these blue sets of letters with respect to the base word (in black font) is very inconsistent.[17] Let me illustrate with some examples:

It is possible that these issues are localized (though I have confirmed with two copies of the textbook), and they might be rectified in future printings. But for those whose print copies are subject to this issue, the effect can be distracting.

Granted, wooden repetition of the exact same substructure of each chapter is probably impossible. However, a bit more consistency in BBG-4 would yield much better user experience. It is a missed opportunity in the updating of the book.

However, the positive changes from BBG-3 to BBG-4 on the whole outweigh the downsides. The revisions made to the discussion of voice (middle and passive, especially) alone probably make the upgrade worthwhile, but several other changes are helpful as well, especially given that the basic skeleton of the textbook has not changed in such a way that would require extensive rework for those moving from the older version to the new one. Though one may feel, at points, like it is two steps forward and one step back, my ultimate verdict is that the upgrade from the third to the fourth edition is the right decision for those who are already using Mounce.

The following discussion is for those who (as suggested above) decide to upgrade from BBG-3 to BBG-4 in their coursework. With any change of a major textbook, instructors need to iron out a lot of details, not all of which can be covered here. I will instead address the big areas where an instructor would need to focus in order to update course materials in line with BBG-4.

Perhaps the biggest area of concern for upgrading from one textbook to a new edition is the sequencing of material. Particularly for something like Greek that is cumulative, a seemingly small shift in chapter order or even arrangement of vocabulary words would throw off all lectures, quizzes, exams, etc. downstream. Fortunately, as discussed above, BBG-4 makes no such substantial changes. But there are a few changes that instructors should note to ensure consistency.

Furthermore, since BBG-4 is now using NA-28 (p. xiii) rather than NA-27, the vocabulary frequencies are slightly updated to reflect the revised critical text. Finally, extra information is occasionally moved from the vocabulary listing to the footnotes (e.g., the spelling changes for ἔχω in ch. 16), but on the whole there remains a lot of commentary (as in BBG-3).

We will conclude with a few suggestions on how an instructor might go about revising course materials in the process of upgrading from BBG-3 to BBG-4 as expeditiously as possible. Much more can be said, but here is where I would focus:

Learning Targets. Clear and measurable Learning Targets appear in statement form at the beginning of each module to provide students with a snapshot preview of the section material, while allowing them to check their understanding before moving on. The objectives are repeated in an engaging question form in context within the module, and then used at the end of each module for review.

A Margin Glossary provides a point-of-use highlight of the vocabulary students need to realize success on the AP exam.

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