Disorders of Language. Ciba Foundation Symposium:

A sign of our times, professionally speaking, is the tremendous proliferation of scientific publication in journal, monograph, or book form. Contributing to this overabundance in no small way is the current vogue for publishing the proceedings of conferences, symposia, and colloquia. It is rare indeed when this results in a really good book, for a number of reasons inherent in the situation itself. Since the meetings, whatever they are called, are organized for the values that accrue from oral presentation, they most often fail to meet the logic of printed publication. A marked unevenness of content and clarity is often evident, since many speakers write well, but others write very poorly. The attempt to transmit to the reader the quality and tone of the conference through an edited presentation of the discussions which follow each paper usually contributes to this unevenness and because ad lib spontaneous speech is