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My company had a dedicated Techcomm department that provided support across
business units. In addition to the writers, we had editors and graphic
artists. It was NICE.
We've been acquired by a company with a very different philosophy, however.
Tech writers are now assigned to individual business units, and the editors
and graphic artists are gone. Quality is definitely going down. :(
On Sun, Nov 2, 2014 at 6:13 AM, Peter Neilson <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net>
wrote:
> .method good another is backwards copy hard the Reading
>
> If you have the time, put your creation away for a month before you look
> at it again. "Who wrote this garbage??!?"
>
> Sometime I'll read material aloud to my wife. There are usually two or
> three errors in half a dozen paragraphs, such as "to" for "too" or "of" for
> "or" and I'll catch them as I pronounce them. Occasionally she'll remark to
> me about an error of fact or a poor explanation. I guess she's just smarter
> than I am.
>
> Oh, there's an error in the paragraph above. I'll send an invisible pony
> to the first to find it.
>
> When I worked for a newspaper and we were setting the "legals" into type
> we used formal proofreading, where one person reads the typeset copy aloud
> to another who holds the typewritten original. "To cap arthur cap
> lessingham L E S S I N G H A M of parts unknown colon, cap a petition has
> been entered in cap cambridge cap district cap court for the termination of
> ..." The legals are ads for tax takings, probate, etc. Occasionally we
> would discover an error in the original, and would call the appropriate
> lawyer or court for clarification. An error in the publication of a legal
> ad invalidates the required publication, resulting in rescheduling of a
> court date and (more importantly) no payment to the newspaper for the ad.
>
> One other method is available to users of Unix or Linux:
> tr " " "\n" <sourcefile|sort -u|>outputfile
>
> That Unix shell command turns all spaces into newlines, so there's one
> word per line. It then sorts into an alphabetical list of words,
> eliminating any duplicates. Examination of the results can reveal the
> presence of unexpected words, overlooked in previous readings because they
> seemed correct in their original context.
>
> Don't have Linux handy because you're Microsoftened? Get cygwin:
>https://www.cygwin.com/
>
>
> On Sat, 01 Nov 2014 23:46:51 -0400, Keith Hood <klhra -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
>
> I wish my stuff were checked by an editor. When you see something too
>> often it begins to fall off your radar.
>> One way to get around that is to print it and check it in hard copy. I
>> find it makes a real difference, maybe because that way I can proof it
>> under conditions other than standard work conditions. Reading it at
>> different times, or in a different place, helps refocus my thinking.
>>
>
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Lin Sims
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