Hello Friendly Readers!
In the Day Job that I'm warned not to quit, I am a Technical Writer and I contribute to our company's bi-monthly blog with a - let's call it a "feature" - that I call "The Grammar Barbarian."
It's a weird name, but it beats "Hot Black Desiado," which has already been taken anyway. I started off as "Grammar Granny," but then I found there already was a Grammar Granny on the interwebs who was actually getting people to pay her for her advice. Being litigation-phobic, I decided to try for something unique. I became the Grammar Barbarian because:
- I like that it's linked to my name
- I'm not a grammar perfectionist. I aim for being understood. If I obey the rules of grammar, that's a bonus
- I thought Barbarian was probably goofy enough that no one else would want it.
Anyhow, the following is from my latest company blog entry that I have their permission to use as long as I don't embarrass the company.
The Grammar Barbarian - Takes Another Look
Have you ever heard the expression "There are none so blind as those who will not see?" It's talking about people who refuse to acknowledge a fact or situation staring them in the face.
I have another take on
those ultra-blind types. I think there are none so blind as those who do
their own proofreading. I know this seems to contradict the common-sense
rule of always checking your work, but hear me out.
When you work on a
project for any length of time, you start to see what should be there,
not what is there. It sometimes takes a fresh pair of eyes to see even the most
egregious errors.
Let me give you a
terrifying example. (This may or may not have happened to someone you know. In
any case, you can't prove it and I don't even work there anymore.)
A poor, little, junior
programmer was trying to earn brownie points toward her next performance review
by helping her boss write a presentation for upper management. She worked very
hard at checking his spelling and grammar and felt proud of the re-writes she
had made to emphasize the points he wanted to make. She was especially proud of
the phrase:
The company must be ready to handle the tremendous shift in data storage from...
If she read
that phrase once, she read it a dozen times, and every time she patted herself
on the back a little harder. She needed no proofreader to tell her how to
spell!
There was just
one little problem. The Gremlins of Mischief had stolen the letter "f" in the
word "shift," leaving quite another word that would cause her boss more than a
little embarrassment at his presentation. She was so confident (some might say
"conceited") in her own writing ability, that she never considered getting
someone else to proof her work.
No brownie
points were earned.
The moral of
this sad little story is that no matter how well you think you've checked your
work, it never hurts to have someone else proofread your document to help find
those "invisible" errors.
