"Peons of Praise"--The Author Said That

Thanks for the heads up on this thread over on 'Made me smile'



I think that's actually quite poetic if taken literally. (in oz idiom 'gross' = disgusting). Silver linings?

This touches on a bugbear of mine - I work with a lot of content created in Word that I have to turn into html. It amazes me how many professionals don't even know about heading styles in Word let alone list formatting, autonumbering and paragraph properties. I always use word with hidden chars showing - EVERYONE hits the return key to space paragraphs. I have a macro shortcut that automatically turns two successive carriage returns into one. Most hit return until they get a page break.

It's such a joy to format a 40 page document turning all the bold 16pt lines into H1's.

I've seen theses with manually maintained tables of contents - so any editing in several hundred pages that moves a page break means the entire TOC has to be changed.

When I first got here I worked as reference librarian - and we had a fair 'mature age' cohort. I remember almost breaking into tears helping a new student in a bridging course who after doing some 'word processing' exercises. Student had come to the desk to see what was wrong with Word because every subsequent change to the text (font substitution, replacing a word) meant they had to redo all their work again.

I was confused but it didn't take long to see the first exercise was center aligning the text. She'd used the space bar to get each line to display in the right place.

She'd used the space bar to get each line to display in the right place.

Oh, me.

It was a typewriting approach to the problem. My almost tears were because I am no teacher - I was at a loss how to break her from the paper paradigm - my lack not hers.

That's a PITA I hve with Word also. I hve a pretty fucked up left hnd with little feeling in the remaining fingers and Im always accidentally hitting a space bar or some of the keys on the left and the bottom. Im often setting up a center spacing wherein , if I make a mistake, When I retype the correction, the entire line of previous text begins to get swallowed up. I LOVE WORD PERFECT because it seems to hqve deadened some of those peripheral key while Im typing away. I also like anything Apple cause its so intuitive.

What Im doing now is using DRGON for writing, the mistakes it makes are purely phonetic ones and my tech assistant gets it correct 99.99% of the time. (Its like how everyone t A2K hs lerned to red my shitty spelling mistakes)

I hadn't realised that's why you have a lot of typos FM - if it's any consolation your brains shine through and it's never bugged me.

That's the difference between FM and BillRM. With FM you can see they're typos, that's not the case with BillRM, the phrasing is a dead giveaway.

I don't agree with FM about everything, but I've never doubted his intelligence. On certain subjects he knows considerably more than me.

I just got this in an all staff email

"They will be moving sequentially through all buildings in no particular order."

Sequentially at random. I love it.

Sequentially at random. I love it.

People who complain may be beaten severely above the head and shoulders.

"LINE UP ALPHABETICALLY ACCORDING TO HEIGHT"--My college swimming coach who had a PhD in SPorts medicine.

Actually my typos are the result of supreme laziness. I correct about half of my typos and say"**** it" to the rest.

ANYWAY, the point was that WordPerfect is amazingly more friendly to the limb challenged.

HH, Glad you found this place. Sequentially in no particular order. Sounds like someone on your staff is writing some of the books I edit.

I'm currently editing a book in which the author doesn't understand the difference between prioritizing things and making something a priority. How do you prioritize one thing? Sigh.

I'm wondering whether people understand that if you do a 360, you're exactly back where you started from, which is fine if that's where you want to be. Sigh.

Like, "Let's make a quick 360 and get the puck out of here"? That's fairly common, and I'm never quite sure they are kidding or not.

Kidding maybe, maybe not, but mathematically challenged? Definitely.

I just started a proofreading job. My first question, "Was this edited by a native English speaker?" Second question: "Was this edited?" Comment: Dirty words. I may ask for more money. If I'm editing, then pay me for editing.

What a woild.

I was contacted by a company that gets outsourced jobs from the company I usually work for. I was offerred a proofreading rate for an editing job.

What a woild.

If you're paid for proofreading, when the author says 'pick', change it to 'puck'. You've done your proofreading.

But Roger. What if the word should be pack?

Then, you're being expected to read minds and rewrite. Puck it!