Drunkard's Walk Forums

Although officially unemployed ("retired" sounds so much nicer), I'm currently helping my sister
with a book she's publishing on teaching literacy. My part of the job is copy-editing the contributions on the subject by a variety of university
professors (each provides a chapter). These are supposed to be well-educated men and women, able to communicate clearly; the subject my sister teaches is
Education, after all, and they're all more-or-less in the same field. I've been savaging their work with vicious glee.



One document included the sentence, "African American communities, for example, are a case in
point." I crossed out "for example" and inserted a terse comment: "Redundant. A 'case in point' IS an example."



(Most of my comments are actually rather more polite, and include explanations of how the style guide
we're supposed to follow dictates the changes I've made - especially in cases where the guide and my own inclinations are at variance. Still….)



"Apology accepted, Captain Needa."

Or, in the words of another of my idols (Dogbert), "I'll dismiss their life's work with a gesture and a witty comment. Bottom line, I'm just
not a people person."
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Big Brother is watching you.  And damn, you are so bloody BORING.

Ah yes. It's wonderful to have a job that can be so thoroughly enjoyed. (^_^)

Quote:These are supposed to be well-educated men and women, able to communicate clearly; the subject my sister teaches is Education, after all, and they're all more-or-less in the same field.

Well, university educators should be capable of writing and speaking well. After all, they need to teach and produce material for publication. But you can be an excellent teacher and not a terribly good writer, or vice-versa.
I assume the book is about basic literacy, teaching methods, and so on. It sounds like the contributing writers are experts in technical issues of education, not zealots of heartbreakingly precise English.
Most folks abuse the English language in some way. Everyone's got a few favourite expressions. But chances are some of those favourite phrases aren't strictly grammatical. That's normal, it's not a huge crime.
Personally, I tend to place brevity over grammar. It's my radio training, you see.
Anyway, all writing can be improved by getting someone else to edit and proof the thing. All writing, no matter how perfect the author thinks it is.
-- Acyl

I have to share this one. It's just too ... too ... I don't know what to call it, except it's not clear English.

The text I edited today included a sentence ending,
"…there has been a trend away from deficit perspectives in terms of viewing students' cultural practices from home and community toward
using these cultural practices as an instructional resource."

I thought about it for a while, mostly trying to figure out what it meant, and then replaced the words "deficit perspectives in terms of viewing"
with "negative views of."
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Big Brother is watching you.  And damn, you are so bloody BORING.

That's not English, it's Postmodernism. If you want to render the precise meaning as clearly as possible, just insert as many iterations of "blah blah blah" as the space requires.