Re: For those who think punctuation matters: validation!

["Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>]

The presence of the second comma makes "and thereafter for
successive five-year terms" a parenthetical insertion, so the
statement about cancellation applies to the first five years.
The absence of the second comma makes the cancellation 
statement apply only to the successive terms.  So yes it was
the comma, but it was also written poorly.  The original term 
and the successive terms should have been addressed
separately.  

However, I'm not sure if this would be very useful to me in
any attempt to convince my upper management to sign off
on editing requisitions.  Since neither version of the sentence
is grammatically incorrect, an editor would have to have been
thoroughly familiarized with the intent of the contract in order
to catch the punctuation error, and even in orgs where I have 
had editors, Tech Pubs has never been included as support for 
contracts.  It's easy for us to see how this incident could have
parallels in user manuals that could lead to undesirable results,
but if those above us had the ability to see it we would already
have been able to convince them to sign off on the editor reqs.

The end result of this will not be the hiring of editors.  The 
person who made the error that was not caught because of
poor writing/no editing will be blamed for it.  I'm sure we can 
all see the technical writing parallel in that.

Gene Kim-Eng


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Posada" <jposada01 -at- yahoo -dot- com>