The Golden 80s

A missing vowel, O, creates a new virus in Times of India, Bengaluru, story titled Disinfection: Businessmen in Bengaluru make killing amid scare .

We, three kids, were not good in solving mathematical problems in school textbooks. There were no outside help, and  we were happily "stuck" with our inability and hereditary weakness in solving the problems. After a while, we never bothered to revisit why we were "stuck". But we never "struck" anyone. We were simply "stuck." And in the last few weeks I heard "struck" again, as the developer was finding it difficult to fix a "small" issue. So, developers will also get "stuck" somewhere. Candid admission anyway. "Struck" is the past tense and past participle of the verb Strike . As a noun, stuck meant "something causing delay or difficulty." Next time, when your tongue inserts an unnecessary "u" in before "r", just strike it off. Otherwise, you will be"stuck" like a door that got closed when the dog was half out of the door. And nobody held the door ajar for the...

As technical writers, most of us get a chance to review documents prepared by colleagues or writers from other teams. While a few may be reluctant to do reviews, it is a fact that the reviews provide technical writers with an opportunity to participate in the quality control process of user and technical documentation. If the team has a technical editor, he or she may be left with enough time to do a thorough review of documents. A process will be in place to plan and complete editing. If one of the team members take up the taks of editing, the edits mostly will be a mix of “copy-editing” and “technical editing". A“production edit” can also be done on the draft versions of the PDFs created to ensure that everything is all right before it is send to the customer. The limiting factor indeed is time. The first step in editing is to read the entire document once. It is indeed a quick read just to get an idea of what is it all about. Such a reading does give me a...