This can't be healthy.
Friday, March 30, 2007
Oh hello, compulsive tendencies!
I've been asked to proofread 75 pages of bios, written by the people being profiled. These people? Are barely literate not writers. I have also been asked to not edit but to only look at formatting and egregious errors. The problem is, they seem to think the only errors that count as egregious are misspelled or completely misused words (e.g., there/they're/their). So I'm having to ignore hundreds of slights to the English language, and it's driving me utterly batshit insane. Like, I feel the need to scream and throw things.
This can't be healthy.
This can't be healthy.
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14 comments:
Oh dear. I think you need to post examples... heh.
Examples like the guy whose 13-sentence bio has 17 exclamation points?
Or maybe a sample sentence: "I received lot of support specially from my wife who not only accepted to relocate to Miami in order to take over my current position with [Company], but also accepts a travel schedule sometime over 50% of my time, balancing her time between taking of our family and her career." (all mistakes, including missing words, in original)
Or Mr. Personals Ad: "I enjoy traveling, cooking, dining and sports. I also enjoy having friends and family comes [sic] over my [sic] house to eat and relax. I also enjoy music and most of the arts. I was born on Flag Day."
Not the worst of the worst, but those were just the top three on my pile. They're almost all that bad.
And FLAG DAY? Come on!
An aside, which you probably found this in your pile of effluence, but when did "could of" take the place of "could have" in written English?
Grrrr.
Kashka is right - it should be couldda. Or maybe could'da =)
"Could of." Ah yes, the triumph of phonetics over actual language. *stabs*
And Diplowhat? Hee! (But you're still fired. Ouch!)
The PAIN!!!! The PAIN!!!!
The Flag Day part made me laugh out loud. Thanks Mr. Dork!
Does this remind anyone else of "Berserker" from Clerks?
http://www.newsaskew.com/summaries/clerks-15.html
Addendum: Speaking of language issues, Blogger is forcing me to use single quoted attributes in my XHTML to properly display the above link. I don't know why this pisses me off, but it does. Grr.
I completely admit to lazy use of language while in IM, or blogging. However, these people are doing it in a bio? A bio that is being proofread by a professional? Are these people smoking something?
Agreed - completely lazy English when blogging, commenting, etc. 'Tis the norm these days. Which brings me to a question - why is that English types (note- proofreader or editor, not so much writers) never find humor in mistakes but instead get upset? I find this an interesting phenomenon. Wog is highly susceptible.
I mean, I do international gov't stuff, but still laugh at it....
Sullenfish: Not until you mentioned it....
Diplowhat: Because we're all humorless gits.
Puck mocks me about it all the time: how inflexible I am, how easily riled up over this. Really, I don't know why it's so hard to laugh off. Probably because it's so pervasive. IM-speak and mistakes in informal correspondence don't bother me in general — I don't proofread my emails before I send them. But even in informal writing, my hackles rise at certain mistakes I see too often or that are so egregious: the abovementioned "could of" comes to mind. And after the 50,000th time you've seen an apostrophe used to form a plural on professional signs, it stops being amusing.
It's sort of like politics. Isolated cases are hilarious: Wow, how dumb did he have to be to get photographed with a donkey, a tub of Vaseline and his pants around his ankles?! But after 24 scandals in as many hours, you start to wonder why we don't just scorch the earth and let the next life form try to do better.
I care about language. I love language. I think it's just about the coolest thing we have. Seeing it abused is like seeing someone kick a puppy. I don't expect everyone to be able to identify a participle, but when native speakers can't even write a coherent paragraph it is, as The Dude said, painful.
The other big part of it, I think, is that so few people seem to care. This project wouldn't have pissed me off except that I was told not to fix anything. The problem, I am being told, isn't with the people who can't be bothered to punctuate or even include all the words in their sentence, it's with people like me who are too picky.
Oh, the apostrophes being used in plain ol' plural words!!! Argh!
That one is fingernails on the chalkboard to me.
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