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...

What is the plural form of phenomenon? School kids will tell it is phenomena. But what happened to " phenomena " in this newspaper report? Pachauri said: "Given the variations in the ocean currents, wind patterns and related sedimentation as well as other phenomenons related to the weather..." The news report also has other usage issues. "The six-member Pachauri Committee, tasked to examine the possibility of cutting a canal through land mass between Dhanuskodi and Rameshwaram,..." Tasked to? When Task is used as a a verb, 'with' follows it. It can be "tasked with" and not "tasked to". The third paragraph has a spelling mistake in "environemntally", that too on World Earth Day!

When I told my journalist friends that I would be joining a software firm as a technical writer, a few raised their eyebrows. While a couple of them said this was a good move, others were less optimistic and predicted that I would soon regret that decision. While I have not started to regret that decision in a very bad way, there are things I enjoy in technical writing. The most important thing I like is the attention to detail. As a technical writer, I have to measure each and every word, each and every sentence, each and every paragraph, and each and every punctuation mark I insert. Every word I write is dear to me and I don't want people to misread it. I also realised that continuos and constant rewriting improve my deliverable in whatever format the team wants. Rewriting is not a boring task, but it is an interesting task. For others, writing is all about writing something new. They don't understand that if they properly rewrite their own writing, it will look new. It shoul...

Many people think that proofreading is just another word for editing. Some believe that it can be classified as another type of editing. They will argue that both essentially mean the same. It is unfortunate to see people from the publishing as well as the media industry holding the same opinion about the topic. The only answer to the controversy is to put the facts straight. The word “proof” in printing means a kind of a test sheet or draft that is checked for text and graphics and colors before going to the press or publishing. This proof is created after all the editing has been completed. The proof created is also checked for grammar, punctuation, and corrections are marked with standard proofreading marks. This “proof reading” can be termed as the last stage of the editing process. It is never a part of the actual editing process or copy editing. Editing, on the other hand, starts the moment you receive the first draft or manuscript. If it is a document, it is checked for the cont...

http://perfectly-write-words.blogspot.com/ http://chompchomp.com/csfs01/csfs01.htm (Exercises) http://www.emints.org/ethemes/resources/S00001517.shtml http://www.proz.com/topic/21937 http://www.prc.dk/english/manuals.htm http://www.journalism.ku.edu/school/bremnertest.shtml (editing test) http://www.getitwriteonline.com/archive/022703.htm