Word geekery

[helblonde]

I'm editing a guidebook about IT responsibilities in M&A.  (Zzzzzz....) I knew I was in trouble when I asked my boss whether there was a technical writer involved and he said "you're it!"

Aside from one of the writers not knowing that we're writing in English, so we don't need to capitalize every single noun, I have grabbed a couple of interesting errors. Today's favorite:

(blah, blah, blah, etc...)


Um, "etc..."? I'm pretty sure the elipsis has no place in business writing and certainly does not need to be combined with et cetera. *sigh*

Comments

[goldenstag.livejournal.com]

Snort. While I use the elipsis more than I ought to in email and such, I try not to use it as much in technical and business writing. It does sort of mean "an unfinished thought", which doesn't look good in those types of writing. Weird.

One of the things I'll be looking for with my Word students is the capitalization issue. And I'm sure with my intro students, I will have some who use too much of the IM shortcuts and will try to sneak those into their writing. Luckily I don't teach the English class they're required to take. <g>

[helblonde.livejournal.com]

I'm completely OK with using the elisis socailly, but I do hope that people writing business, uh, literature can finish their thoughts.

Academically, there is the potential to use an elipsis to signal material is being left out of a quote, but that's it. Oddly, professors expect students to finish their thoughts just like I expect my coworkers to.

There is an amusing difference in how the elipsis is created in Word and how I was taught about it in a CAL Extension editing class. Word shortens the unified punctuation, while I was taught by the editor that an elipsis is period-space-period-space-period-space.

[lifeofglamour.livejournal.com]

Huh. I would have thought that "blah blah blah" and "etc" were redundant enough already.

[helblonde.livejournal.com]

Well I left out the originallist because it was just as boring as the "blah, blah, blah". To be accurate to the original, though, I should have written "Blah, Blah, Blah".

random numbers

[finickynarcane.livejournal.com]

I love the people who think and elipsis consists of some random, non-three number of periods. Better yet, is the person I've seen using large numbers of commas where I think they intended an elipsis. Granted, both of those examples are from social writing.

Re: random numbers

[goldenstag.livejournal.com]

I told my Word students (I teach at a local vocational school) Wednesday that the three dots have a name, and some software actually converts them to a single character if you type "...". I got some raised eyebrows at that. It was kind of interesting to see how few people know that.