Style crazy
Mar. 12th, 2007 10:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
j4Too much screengazing over the weekend for various reasons gave me a screaming headache, which has (unsurprisingly) resurfaced at work and is proving resistant to paracetamol. Even the badger on top of my monitor is failing to cheer me up.
It would have been useful to know before spending two hours of my weekend proofreading a 96-page document that approximately 50% of my corrections would be rejected on the grounds that "we can't change their text" (surely if someone gives you copy for inclusion in your publication you can copy-edit it for typos, grammar, etc.?) and "it's house style".
House style (largely undocumented) includes: not using hyphens, ever, under any circumstances; italicising any instance of an "e-" prefix (e.g. e-learning, e-mail -- yes, hyphens are allowed there, because that's house style); and freely overriding any pre-declared (sorry, pre declared) aspect of house style because "we don't do it like that" and "it's house style".
Still, I've only been shouted at once so far today, for the unrelated error of failing to understand that "What's this software for? What does it do?" meant "Which of my email folders should I file the receipt in?"
It would have been useful to know before spending two hours of my weekend proofreading a 96-page document that approximately 50% of my corrections would be rejected on the grounds that "we can't change their text" (surely if someone gives you copy for inclusion in your publication you can copy-edit it for typos, grammar, etc.?) and "it's house style".
House style (largely undocumented) includes: not using hyphens, ever, under any circumstances; italicising any instance of an "e-" prefix (e.g. e-learning, e-mail -- yes, hyphens are allowed there, because that's house style); and freely overriding any pre-declared (sorry, pre declared) aspect of house style because "we don't do it like that" and "it's house style".
Still, I've only been shouted at once so far today, for the unrelated error of failing to understand that "What's this software for? What does it do?" meant "Which of my email folders should I file the receipt in?"
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no subject
Date: 2007-03-12 11:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-12 11:40 am (UTC)To be honest I was thinking of using
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Date: 2007-03-12 11:51 am (UTC)I know that kind of feeling. One of my cow-orkers is trying to fill in his expenses at the moment, and I've resorted to using the ipod to block out the stream of invective.
Okay, it's him shouting at his computer rather than at somebody, but I'm sure even large accounting systems have feelings.