[TAG] [lg-announce] Linux Gazette #171 is out!

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ren?? Pfeiffer (lynx at luchs.at):

> I think I get the point of Rick's article. It's a pleasure to read it
> and my wife (a bookseller in Vienna's British Bookshop) enjoyed the
> style. So I am quite surprised to see the discussion about the content
> turning into a flame war.

I'm very glad you both liked it.

My annoyance at Ben's going out of his way to claim -- at the bottom of
my article on copyediting -- that I cannot spell the word "vary",
followed by Kat's implication that I needed to be taught the concept of
collective nouns, _follows_ my very politely and privately pleading with
them in January to please cease screwing around with the two articles, which
I had already (on January 4th) been obliged to manually un-damage.  I
quote that mail below.  Please note the bit about "I would appreciate
restraint in fooling with it again -- lest we look really bad in
public".

This has all happened before:  I ask privately for greater restraint in
kindly not damaging articles.  And then it happens again.  Over and
over.

So, this time, not being content to introduce incompetent copyedits into
my articles that make me look illiterate, Ben and Kat felt obliged to
append editorial footnotes implying I'm an incompetent speller and an
ignoramus.   In an article about how I perform my job as head copyeditor
(which job they seem intent on making difficult)!  That's why I'm pretty
steamed about this.



 Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 14:31:58 -0800
 From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
 To: ben at linuxgazette.net, kat at linuxgazette.net
 Subject: Planning for issue 171

[Snip discussion of svn mechanics by which copyedits to my two articles
were being silently discarded yet again, needing to be re-submitted from
scratch, using my personal backup copies.]


I also did have recent saves of both files in my /tmp directory.
Diffing those against the most recent svn copies revealed some things I
wanted to check with you good folks on.  The main thing is
nonstyleguide.html, which, I hope you'll agree, really does need to be
free of grammatical errors, otherwise we'll look really silly.


I had:

   Indian, Irish, Zambian, Fijian, Canadian, and Kiribatian English need
   to be respected as much as, say, UK and US English are.

Repo copy:

   Indian, Irish, Zambian, Fijian, Canadian, and Kiribatian English needs
   to be equally respected as is, say, UK and US English.

Problem:  "UK and US English" is not a singular noun.  "Indian, Irish,
Zambian, Fijian, Canadian, and Kiribatian English" is not (in context) a
singular noun, either.  The grammar was correct as originally written.

I like the relocation of that verb, though.  Whenever there's an
articles/171 directory in the repo, I'll check this in:

   Indian, Irish, Zambian, Fijian, Canadian, and Kiribatian English need
   to be respected as much as are, say, UK and US English.



I had a subheader:

   The Argument Clinic's That-a-Way

Repo copy:

   The Argument Clinic's That-A-Way

I'm sympathetic with whoever made that change, because the lower-case
"a" looks funny.  Problem is, non-leading articles (and prepositions)
just do not get capitalised.  So, again, the lettercase was correct as
originally written.


I had:

     stilted alleged quotations festooned around many "News Bytes" columns
     are a case in point:

Repo copy:

     stilted alleged quotations festooned around many "News Bytes" columns 
     is a case in point:

No, sorry.  The sentence's subject is "quotations", which is plural.
Subject must agree with verb, so it's "quotations are", not "quotations
is" -- even though the object of the sentence's linking verb is singular.  

There were a bunch more examples like that (but I won't belabour the
point).  Anyhow, I'm aware that my ability to copyedit my own pieces is 
limited (always a problem with one's own writing), but I think what I'll
be checking into #171 will be properly repaired and would appreciate
restraint in fooling with it again -- lest we look really bad in public.




I very much appreciated both of your comments inserted into the
nonstyleguide.html file.  I note something Ben said, in particular:

  We do our best to leave the style of the writing alone, though;
  the author's voice is indeed an important and valuable part of the
  whole, and deserves to be heard.


My opening sentence for firefox.html began:

  Linux users tend, I've noticed, to complain about suckiness on the Web
  itself and in their own Web browsers — browser bloat [...]

Repo copy:

  I've noticed Linux users tend to complain about suckiness on the Web
  itself, and in their own Web browsers: browser bloat [...]


Eric Raymond tells me I have a very distinctive writing and speaking
style ("voice"), and that I'm practically the only person he knows 
who writes exactly the way he speaks.  The point is that my opening
sentence, as submitted, is the way I speak, and the rewrite is not.
When I speak or read that, it seems streamlined and flattened to death,
and just not my speaking style.  

Try to imagine my speaking voice, talking to you out-loud, and I think
you'll hear a certain number of dependent clauses and parenthetical
inclusions -- commas and all.

Which reminds me:  There was nothing wrong with that — .  Changing
it to a colon was not clearly an improvement.  There are people who use
wrong punctuation that needs correction, but I'm not usually among them.