"I can talk English, I can walk English, and I can laugh English because English is a very phunny language. Bhairo becomes Byron because their minds are very narrow."
Amitabh Bachchan in Namak Halaal
Yeah! English is a very FUNNY language! For most of us Indians it is a second, or maybe third, or in really interesting cases fourth, fifth .... language! 26 alphabets out of which 5 are vowels and all of these rules are enough to drive you up the wall. "i" before "e" ... and then all those rule-breakers, homonyms, .... and to this add the editing for technical writing rules!!! Oh jeezzz?! What the heck is going on?!
In my team we are about 9 writers (the about is cause at times the writers don't write), one editor marked EMSs to EMSes another marked EMSes back to EMS and the writer was ready to freak!!! So there is this argument "What is the rule for making a plural of an abbreviation?" Who really cares? OSes or OSs? Potatoes Potaatoes -- let's call the whole thing off!!!
What an interesting life we lead? Writers (and I too am guilty of this one at times) sneak stuff in without checking and sit back, wait, and watch "Does the editor catch this?!" Now that I am an editor, I have to support my edits with reasons and rules. (Imagine ME marking things with "see CMS #6.16?!) How the mighty have fallen!!!
Uff!! I tell you languages are meant to let people communicate and the rules esp. The TW editing rules FORCE you to do such strange things!!! Not that other languages don't have trouble - the use of gender for inanimate things baffles non-Hindi folks no end. The bong-side of my family always jokes - Inspector AATA hai, constable AATA hai, lekin police AAATTTII hai!!! I thought about it a LOT and finally gave them a clue anything with an "eee" Ki matra is streeling! Nah! This rule is bogus - they proved it - SIRISH AATA hai, Madhu aati hai,....
Back to English now: all the rules that they have, Tech Writing editors bite, chew up, and then throw out! The rules that I learnt said that anything that ends with "x", "s", or "chi" gets "ex" to make it plural. You know bus-> buses, dress -> dresses, but SOS is SOSs (or SOSes or SOS's)!!! Laaaah!!!
I feel the rules or in cases such as our's the lack of them rules in technical writing add that mysterious dash of the unknown.
The amount of time TWs and editors spend on line width, character spacing, use of contractions, ... is not even funny! I mean how many people except nit-pickers pay attention to such things? But who am I to object? If it wasn't for such rules God alone knows what we would do?!
I wonder what makes some people so bad at writing and some so good? Does it have something to do with the type of fiction you read, your love for words, your need to fluff up your sentences to prove your one-up-(wo)man-ship?!
I am quite fascinated by linguistics, the way people read out guides (or don't RTFM?!), just curious... do they even care???? We focus on the viens on the leaves and the poor tree is lost!!!
Now I have a problem remembering mundane things like spellings and English rules - does that make me a bad writer? I don't think so . . .
Do we TWs make a big fuss about things that don't really matter and completely miss the point? See the leaves and lose the forest maybe?!
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