Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Check-in, typos, and [sic]

Well hello to alllll my many and multitudinous readers out there! And is there indeed a difference between "many" and "multitudinous"...? Only the few might hazard a guess. By the way, I'll try to catch these typos, but there are sometimes gonna be instances of multiple letters or characters in my posts, and this is due to the settings of the repeat speed on my new Dell laptop, which if I slowed down anymore would be aggravating but which manages to insert an extra character if I'm not VERY careful and nimble.

Also: In time, maybe more readers of this blog will be editors themselves and I'll post with their interest more in mind (although I myself have no desire at all to follow an editing blog). I could get into, for example, the ways whereby a well-written document takes the caring editor as long to finish as one that’s badly writtten (there's that speed-typo!), yet with a doc that’s very, very well-written, to the point where the editor almost questions his or her service to it, he/she just has a good ol' time, and even though he/she cares about the paper, the project gathers a breakaway speed and one is happily done in record time. Meanwhile, another Q & A from recently...

In some of the quotes you put sic, I apologize but I'm not familiar with that term. Would you clarify this for me, please?

That's Latin which writers or editors use when the word or phrase that comes before it is incorrect grammatically or, most likely, spelling-wise. We do it when we don't really have the right to change it ourselves, like in a quote, so we use [sic] to indicate "this was in the original and we're leaving as is." I suspect that some of your case-study quotations were transcribed wrongly, so you can probably fix a number of them yourself if you feel the authority.

Okey-doke, "everyone"? Bye for now. -NP

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