To be fair, English is not her first language.
I found an error in the Blue Book - the style and citation manual used in legal writing, published by the Harvard Law Review, and compiled by the editors of the Harvard, Columbia, U Penn and Yale law reviews, and used by all legal journals everywhere as well as in everyday legal life. When you’re on law review, you receive a serious upbraiding for trivial editing errors, such as if you italicize the second comma in “see, e.g.,” yet the Blue Book itself contains an error.
If any legal nerds want to check it out, its on page 408 of the 18th Edition. In the index.
The lawyer who defends himself has a fool for a client, and a fool for an attorney. Likewise, with vanishingly rare exceptions, an editor should not edit himself. It’s a fairly well known fact, at least within the relevant community, that one does not “see” the majority of the mistakes in body text one writes – you know what you intended to write, and did write, and read it as such. The glaringly obvious in retrospect barf on the page that you keyed in instead of what you intended – you just plain do not perceive it, but what you thought you keyed in instead. It’s always been a bugaboo for me, even though I have some facility at self-edit, and as my vision has deteriorated, it’s been more and more a problem. (Maggie the Ocelot, you know that thing Queen Charles won’t be needing any more after his SRS, in the Kings of Norway GQ thread? Guess what I want you to go do with it! :mad: :p)
AnywaY, while ol’ Smiley can occasionally be a bit of a dick on matters political, I think he deserves a break here, and all the folks having fun at the expense of his typoes are invited to contact Maggie and follow her example after she’s done.
Yes. I think she was going for “imperative”.
(bolding mine)
This is a much bigger issue than a typo or misspelled word. When I hire people, it’s because I want somebody else to be responsible for a particular task or project. Shit happens in every job - errors get missed, things get forgotten, and jobs get done wrong. When that happens, I want somebody whose first thought is “let’s fix it,” not “it’s not my fault!”
What if you hire somebody so bad that they got everything on their resume correct by accident?
Exactly. I can read through a page of my own writing half a dozen times and still sometimes miss an error.
I tell my students that, if they keep making typos and spelling errors and grammatical errors, they should have someone else look over their work, because a new pair of eyes will often immediately catch something that the author has missed.
Of course, with my students, one of the problems is not simply that they fail to spot errors during proofreading; it’s that they don’t bother proofreading at all. As far as they’re concerned, if the spell check function on their word processor didn’t catch anything, the paper must be fine.
So I was reading that as I was on hold, and someone picked up right as I was done. I chuckled in her ear.
How the hell would I know it was accidental until after I hired them? :dubious:
The discussion here seems to have moved on, but I’ll point out a method that helps in these situations. When filling out a webform that includes essays or other blocks of texts (I’ve had to do a few of these for fellowship applications), write the text in a word processor first and cut and paste it in when it’s ready. That way you have plenty of time to revise and do all the needed spelling and grammar checks.
Isn’t that kind of a no-brainer? Who types in and sends a first draft (that they can’t even see to proofread properly) for anything even remotely important?
Heck, anytime I see one of those forms I automatically boot up Word, prepare my text, proofread it, save it, then copy and paste it into the form. I can’t imagine ever not doing so, especially if it’s something important like a resume or cover letter!
Not doing so, to me, indicates a lazy, sloppy mindset.
They accidently the whole thing?
With this method, you also have the option of saving your answers to the form. Ergo, the next time you fill out a similar form, you can just tweak what you already have written to match that question.
Pretty useful for certain things, especially in the realm of applying for a job where the questions on different forms are often similar.
Amazing. I point out a rare mistake of my own because it was an embarassing rarity, post my best-guess as to why it occurred, and am immediately attacked on a personal level by a poster who never met me, and who begins making judgements about my personality and work habits.
So, alright, oh little perfect Snow Pea. Please, tell us all how wonderful perfect you are and how you never made such a mistake. You have never once made a mistake in some “important,” hmm?
I once sent out a memo to my entire company – more than 300 people – telling them not to hoard toner cartridges for their department printers.
Except that I wrote “horde” instead.
Trinopus (could have been worse; could have been “whored.”)
P.S. Nobody ever mentioned it to me, either… Did no one notice? Aiee!
I’ve often suspected, when reading your posts, that you were tossing off.
I’ve got to agree with the OP: you’re being a fucking douchebag.
He posted specifically to point out his error, and conceded in the OP itself that it was his own mistake, and that he was embarrassed by it. Everyone makes mistakes like this now and again. The main difference is that some folks learn from and and do their best not to make the same mistake twice, while others either don’t care, or are so oblivious that they never catch the mistake at all.
Continuing to ride someone like you are, and to extrapolate from a single instance to a conclusion about some fundamental defect in his makeup, is just being an asshole.
Just MHO.
Yeah, in an interview situation I once called someone out for their resume which listed “attentin to detials”.
To be fair, it wasn’t the main reason that he didn’t get the job, but I thought that he should know if he was sending the same resume around the traps.
Par for the course on this board, though.
Heh. It is a community, even if it’s sometimes like a dysfunctional family having a screeching argument about who burned dinner.