Yeah! And splitting an infinitive, while “wrong”, makes more sense sometimes than doing it the “proper” way. All these tanj-ing rules come from the Renaissance obsession with making English “equal” to Latin in “quality”.
Ugh.
Grammar rules are good to know, and fun to play with if you know them, but I read many technical books that have their grammar fine and everything else screwed up.
Go for clarity and accuracy. We desperately need technical books that we can understand and that give us the right information. :smack:
Just thought of something else that I used to torture my students with. (And there’s that preposition ending a sentence again. Perhaps I should say something with which I used to torture my students.)
Anyway, I’d give them a worksheet with 20 lines on it. The exercise was to punctuate each line correctly. Everything counted: capitalization, commas, quotation marks, italics and so on. Additionally, some lines were sentences; some were two sentences. A few examples:
sally brown is an fbi agent based in cincinnati ohio
toms latest book is called industrial design in the twentieth century
sue said jenny lets go to the movies today jenny said good idea sue
janice test drove the ford taurus the chevy cavalier and the toyota corolla
john elway was a quarterback for the nfls denver broncos
attach the gizmo to the widget as shown in figure d
it has been said that george lucas greatest film was star wars
youll need the smith file the jones file and the williams file
And so on. See how you can crosscheck for consistency as well as for standard editing requirements? (For example, book and movie titles are typically italicized.) You can crosscheck for serial comma use, capitalization consistency (is it FBI or F.B.I.? If the latter, watch for N.F.L. instead of NFL), and possessives.
In your case, I’d recommend forty or fifty such lines. My students hated this exercise. But I loved it. It really demonstrated what they did (or did not) know.
633squadron – nope, not for a tech writer; for a magazine editor. He or she will need to know how to deal with not only spelling and punctucation, but also what to do with a badly written piece of prose – which this is. (I’m beginning to see how people get obsessed with the Bulwer-Lytton contest.)
Spoons – fun idea – but since I already have a couple of hours invested in the other strategy, I’m gonna stick with that.
I wish I could share the finished product with y’all, because I’m damn proud of how awful it is, but I don’t want a version of this available on the internet, even anonymously.
You guys rawk – I really appreciate all the helpful ideas you’ve been coming up with.
Since it is a gardening magazine, why don’t you throw in a tomato/tomatoe or a potato/potatoe misspelling? As an homage to Dan Quayle/Quail. Also what about ensuring that he/she is familiar with the correct way to add the scientific (latin) names for plants?
The poster who started this thread, i.e., twickster
Commas belong on both sides of the “e.g.” or “i.e.”. Some folks seem to just throw them in there with no delineation at all. And please don’t start a sentence with either one.
I remember taking an editing test where it talked about something that was true in, say, 44 states – but the table listing the states where it wasn’t true only listed four states.
twickster, allow me one suggestion. Once the sample is prepared you should have a current employee doing a similar job description review and edit it. It’d be worthwhile knowing what a realistic performance would be.
You perception of it’s difficulty may be different than a fresh set of eyes. It’s be a shame for you to create a sample that’s deceptively tricky and filter out an otherwise suitable candidate.
Excellent point, omniscient – but there is no current employee. I’m their first hire, and, strictly speaking, I haven’t started yet. The test we use at the current job is set up differently, since it’s a different job – but the idea of that test is that no one does perfectly on it, it’s a chance to see what kinds of mistakes people make, whether they have the aptitude for the job or not. Plus we grade it with the candidate watching, and it’s very revealing how they respond to the mistakes they made. So, no, I’m not going into this with an idea that X, Y, or Z is the right answer – I want to see what kinds of things the candidate sees, and how he or she deals with them. For instance, I start a sentence “Once [this happened],…” then blah blah, then I start two sentences in a row “Once [blah blah]…” Will the person notice this? If so, yay, it’s bad writing and I’d prefer a person who does and rewrites that section. If not – well, it’s not wrong …
(And Salem honey – long time no see! How the heck are you?)
Twix–My top 8 list of persistent problems my students manage to work into their papers are
singular/plural confusions:
"One thing that can define a person’s personality is their name. "
over-reliance on “to be” verbs (as in the sentence above .)
Wordiness–as in the overreliance on the word “thing.”
Redundancy–“person’s personality.” I’d want that sentence, if given to an editor for revision, to read “Our names help to define our personalities,” or some such. This was literally the first sentence of the first student’s paper that I opened up to find you some examples of amateur prose.
clueless punctuation: “he grew up, in Paterson New Jersey.” (Periods inside quotation marks, generally, aren’t a judgment call in the US, which is the market this person will be editing for. I would definitely ask an editor to flag all such misuses.) Comma splices abound and need to be caught. Stalking wild apostrophe’s (or sometimes apostrophes’) is needed in a good editor as well.
inconsistent diction levels : inappropriate slang or direct address in an otherwise formal piece, and absurdly stilted diction in otherwise casual essays.
7)Needless negatives: “is not permanent” instead of “is temporary.”’
failure to subordinate: writing that lacks style because every sentence is either a simple sentence or a simple sentence joined to other simple sentences with conjunctions. An editor should be able to figure out which sentences need to be subordinate clauses (or sometimes eliminated entirely.)
No. For a variety of reasons: Haven’t purchased a stylebook yet; haven’t decided which one to get (I’m leaning toward Chicago, just because it’s what I’m used to – but want to thumb through a copy of AP, which I haven’t looked at in years); and I’m not giving him a dictionary, either (which I also haven’t picked yet).
Basically, I want to see what he can do with this just based on his own knowlege and instincts. (FTR, I consider “I’d need to look this up” an acceptable – no, actually, an excellent – response.)
But the two phrases have different connotations. “Temporary” means short term. “Not permanent” means it is expected to change at one point, but will be that way indefinitely. “Permanent” means it is not expected to change at all.
For instance, the powers the President has claimed to assumed due to the war in Iraq are not permanent – eventually, when certain conditions are met, he expects to give them up. However, since they don’t expire, they aren’t temporary.
Likewise, there’s a difference between the phrase “not unusual” and “usual,” despite the fact “usual” and “unusual” are antonyms.
