That will be one of my few weaknesses, thank you very much.
Edit: Her name is Krista Sidwell. That's her married name. I don't know her maiden name. I worked with her on several projects at Nu Skin, but somehow I barely remember her. Seems like our stints at IS overlapped a little as well, although I just can't dig up a really solid memory of her there.
[ January 14, 2004, 04:03 PM: Message edited by: advice for robots ]
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The name Krista doesn't ring a bell. I don't really know that many of my IS predecessors, unfortunately.
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I love students who try to sound smarter by using the thesaurus.
One of them started with, “another source of error due to disturbances in the air” and somehow got to “altercations in the air.” I asked him who he got into the fight with.
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quote: The problems has been raised by members of the Department advisory council, but by faculty members, prominent alumni, various chairs and increasingly by editors of major publications who do not see the BYU graduates as being prepared or able to function well in an environment outside of BYU or the state of Utah.
Personally, the only way this sentence makes any sense to me is to change this way. . .
The problems have been raised not by members of the Department advisory council, but by faculty members, prominent alumni, various chairs, and increasingly, by editors of major publications who do not see the BYU graduates as being prepared or able to function well in an environment outside of BYU or, the state of Utah.
But then again, I use way too many commas.
[ January 14, 2004, 04:41 PM: Message edited by: jack ]
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So, did he drop a not or did he write a completely crappy sentence.
I like the drop-a-not idea (I do that all the time), but if Jon Boy guesses wrong, that could change the meaning of the entire sentence.
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quote:My boss, purportedly a writer, uses the word "flustrated" in e-mails.
"Flustrated" is perfectly fine! Though you may not find it in a dictionary, it's a really nice combination of "frustrated" and "flustered"; the meaning is quite clear from its components (and from context, no doubt). As long as it's used with the knowledge that it's not a "real" word, I've got no problem with it. Another one along these lines is "twidgeting", which is one of my favorite pastimes.
quote:You know what else I love? People who spell weird as wierd.
Damn, you beat me to it. I know poor spelling isn't quite the same as poor grammar (a subcatagory, perhaps?), but interchanging vowels is one of the things that is most glaring to my eye. Perhaps that's because my name is so often misspelled as "Micheal", despite its status as one of the most common names among English-speaking males. (Similarly misspelled on occasion is the name of a particular small Middle Eastern country that's been in the press quite a bit lately (and not so lately).)
quote:The problems has been raised by members of the Department advisory council, but by faculty members, ...
I think what the journalism professor may have been going for was something like "The problems ha[ve] been raised not only by members of the Department advisory council, but by faculty members, ...". This is actually something that I misread quite often -- that is, I somehow miss the presence of the words "not only" and as a result have difficulty parsing the sentence.
By the way, the astute reader may already have noticed my favorite grammatical error (if it indeed may be termed such), as I have utilized it in this very post. Posts: 1810 | Registered: Jan 1999
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Jack, the problem is that later on, he pretty clearly says that the advisory council did express those views. From the context of the chapter, it has to be either a "not only . . . but also" or an "and." Right now I'm leaning more towards "completely crappy sentence" than "dropped word." I'm asking him what he means, but right now, I'd rewrite it like this:
quote:The problem has been raised by members of the department advisory council, other faculty members, prominent alumni, various chairs, and increasingly by editors of major publications who see the BYU graduates as being unprepared for an environment outside of Utah.
[ January 14, 2004, 05:04 PM: Message edited by: Jon Boy ]
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Jon Boy, I think your rewrite of this section -- "do not see the BYU graduates as being prepared or able to function well in an environment outside of BYU or the state of Utah" -- substantially changes its meaning, although it improves the clarity.
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Yeah, I think I went overboard and cut a little too much. Any suggestions for a better balance between original meaning and clarity?
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quote:I know! It's the word "utilized." High on my list of annoying words.
Annoying, I'll grant you. (Sorry about that. ) I don't think it's grammatically incorrect, though.
quote:Ironical
Actually, Webster lists this as a variation of "ironic". (There, I did it again!)
One of the favorite words of some of my high school classmates was "conversating" (or, "conversatin'").
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My current annoyance is the use of 'lead' as the past-tense of 'lead.' The 'its/it's' thing used to bug me, but I generally just accept it now. I was surprised to see both spellings used in one sentence and have them both be wrong, though.
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Mike, are you talking about the period/comma inside/outside quote marks? Because the American and UK/Canadian/Australian/etc. conventions are quite different.
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quote:Mike, are you talking about the period/comma inside/outside quote marks? Because the American and UK/Canadian/Australian/etc. conventions are quite different.
Yes, indeed. I'm curious: what are the differences in conventions? (That is, where are they sane?)
I've just remembered one that really annoys me for some reason. People don't know how to spell "lose". "Loose" has an /s/ sound at the end, not a /z/! Posts: 1810 | Registered: Jan 1999
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Mike, I believe that both they (UK, et al.) and we (US) put ?s, !s, and ;s where they belong logically (inside the " "s if part of the quote, outside if not); while they do the same for .s and ,s, and we always put them inside, regardless of use.
It's one of the few grammar/usage differences where I think their way makes more sense than ours. Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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My (Canadian) style guide says to put commans and periods inside the quotation marks, colons and semicolons outside the quotation marks, and dashes, question marks, and exclamation points inside the quotation marks only if they are a part of the quotation.
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quote: In the United States, periods and commas go inside quotation marks regardless of logic. In the United Kingdom, Canada, and islands under the influence of British education, punctuation around quotation marks is more apt to follow logic. In American style, then, you would write: My favorite poem is Robert Frost's "Design." But in England you would write: My favorite poem is Robert Frost's "Design".
So according to that site, I was correct the first time. Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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The computer programmer sent out an e-mail early this morning to a dozen councils with, in the subject line, "Software Up Date"!!!
First, they shouldn't send out ANYTHING without vetting it through the editors. Second, what on earth!?!
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Maybe he's talking about the Date when the Software will be Up. Though using a hyphen would make that a little more clear.
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quote:"Both the Daily Universe and the broadcast entities would increasingly find themselves producing mediocre journalists would work for meciocre organizations," Barney believed.
Allegedly, this is a quote from a faculty member. I hope that it's just a mistake and that the journalism professors don't all write like this.
quote:Lacking diversity on its faculty and a conformist approach few students ever evolve to real reporters, the edgy people that are needed to push back the envelope."
Allegedly, this is another quote. However, there's no beginning quotation mark, so I'm not sure if the entire thing is a quote, or the beginning is some sort of lead-in. Either way, the non-parallelism and dangling modifier makes me cry.
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Now I'm fascinated by the journalism program at BYU.
My group of friends at the moment are almost to the (wo)man BYU graduates, and there are some of the funniest disconnects. We went to a cabin for the weekend, and there were 25-year-old men and women wondering about a chaperone.
Oh, what was the other one? Road trips. Nobody's been on road trips with a mixed group. Also, academic politics - that liberal bias OSC keeps talking about? - they didn't know it existed.
What else does the thing you are editing say? Do you agree with it?
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quote:What else does the thing you are editing say? Do you agree with it?
It's a 367-page manuscript, and I've only read to about page 200 so far. It's not terribly interesting, to be honest. Lots of it talks about the changing programs, faculty politics, and so on. But one of his big points seems to be that journalism students don't learn enough about journalism to actually become journalists. Rather, they become the next generation of faculty at BYU. I heartily agree with his assessment of the skill level of most journalism students. The Daily Universe is poorly written and poorly edited. It's pretty clear that most of the students aren't learning good writing and investigative skills.
The problem is that the author falls into the category of graduates without much real-world experience. He knows enough about journalism to sound like a journalist, but his writing is generally atrocious. I've been editing this book since almost the beginning of last fall semester, and I'm nowhere near done with it. The sentences I've posted are fairly typical; not every sentence is like that, but there are usually a few on each page.
So do I agree with it? Yeah, I guess so. I already had a pretty negative image of BYU's Communications Department, especially the journalism program, before I ever started reading this book. And this book has only reinforced that image.
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The state of Pennsylvania had a slogan that was actually imprinted on ALL license plates that read "You've Got A Friend In Pennsylvania". Some of them are still floating around out there on older cars...
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Check it out: Jesse Jackson is so dumb he even misspells words when he speaks :
quote:Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, said that the pop star "deserves due process," and that "the newsrooms should remain objective and the global community must not hasten to judgement."
Heck, he can't even be quoted without the punctuation getting messed up.
Or Yahoo news could be incompetent. *shrug*
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That was one. Also the spelling of "judgment."
(Which is also misspelled on a recommendation form I was asked to fill out for a local university . . . When I pointed it out to a counselor at my school, she argued with me! )
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Hate to tell you this, Ic, but she was right. I confirmed with Merriam-Webster -- "judgment" is the original spelling; "judgement" an acceptable variant.
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Several physical dictionaries I looked it up in, and MS Word, FWIW, don't recognize "judgement."
Posts: 1112 | Registered: Jan 2003
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My spell-checker doesn't like it either. But it has been used in the UK for some time, and seems to have become accepted here as well. I still think it looks wrong -- but I also am still getting used to using "hopefully" to mean "it is to be hoped." Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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I thought the Universe was actually pretty liberal. They were all agitating against the U.S. invading Iraq. So if they were ignorant of the liberal bias, is it possible they are part of it?
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MS Word's spell checker is pretty lacking. It misses lots of other perfectly cromulent words. What dictionaries did you check? Merriam-Webster and American Heritage both have it, and M-W is one of the best dictionaries out there.
The Universe, liberal? This is the first I've heard about it. Sure, people have protested the war in Iraq, but everybody's doing that. That hardly makes them liberal.
[ January 16, 2004, 10:16 AM: Message edited by: Jon Boy ]
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The only things worth reading in the Universe were Eric Snyder's column, the student opinions, and Police Beat. I could never tell if Police Beat were written tongue-in-cheek or not. It tried so hard to be serious about what were usually such funny events. It would get to the end of telling about somebody's can of pop being stolen, and then say, "Police are still investigating the incident." Delicious.
The student opinions were worth a few chuckles at well. I'm fairly conservative, but some of these guys took the cake. I remember one guy scolding the women on campus for being too good looking and making all the men have inappropriate thoughts. And he was serious. Everyone on campus with a stick too far up their you-know-where seemed to get their turn in the op-ed pages.
Eric Snyder, of course, was usually the only reason I picked up the paper on whatever day his column ran (I can't remember). He was the closest thing to a celebrity that I ever saw at BYU.
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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Microsoft Word keeps trying to make me change "there" to "they're" in one spot, and I definitely mean "over there" as opposed to "they are." Spell check telling me I'm wrong. Posts: 981 | Registered: Aug 2003
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That's not spell check, that's grammar check. And MS Word's grammar check should be turned off. It is literally wrong more often than right.
Posts: 1112 | Registered: Jan 2003
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It is indeed. OTOH, if you know the rules of grammar fairly well, it can be a useful way to catch silly errors. Like the verbs I put in the wrong tense all over Hatrack yesterday! Don't know what was wrong with me, but I later caught three (I think) times where my verb doesn't agree with my subject or is in the wrong tense.
I am NOT going to go back and fix them. I am NOT that obsessive. No, really, I'm not. (Well, and having an edit time/date hours and hours later than the post bothers me more. )
I'm just going to let them stay there and bug the hell out of me. Especially since one already got quoted by someone. Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Though you may not find it in a dictionary, it's a really nice combination of "frustrated" and "flustered"; the meaning is quite clear from its components (and from context, no doubt). As long as it's used with the knowledge that it's not a "real" word, I've got no problem with it. Another one along these lines is "twidgeting", which is one of my favorite pastimes.![[Smile]](smile.gif)
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) I don't think it's grammatically incorrect, though.![[Mad]](mad.gif)
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Now I'm gonna have to look it up! ![[Cry]](graemlins/cry.gif)
Thank you. I'll remember that. id est = that is = i.e.
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Ic, maybe I'm just tired, but I'm not seeing the problem. ![[Angst]](graemlins/angst.gif)
When I pointed it out to a counselor at my school, she argued with me! ![[Laugh]](graemlins/laugh.gif)
Mars thread![[Wall Bash]](graemlins/wallbash.gif)
