I don't care how posters on the forum write.
But I expect professional writers and editors to do their jobs correctly.
Backshop I used to be accused of being a grammar nazi when I would call someone out on their capitalization, spelling, punctuation and grammar. They'd always excuse it by saying "I was in a hurry". I'd just laugh and shake my head because if you really know how to write correctly, it doesn't take any extra time and it comes naturally.
I used to be accused of being a grammar nazi when I would call someone out on their capitalization, spelling, punctuation and grammar. They'd always excuse it by saying "I was in a hurry". I'd just laugh and shake my head because if you really know how to write correctly, it doesn't take any extra time and it comes naturally.
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
York1While I'm a fan of well-written posts with words spelled correctly, I believe on a site like this, it's just plain bad manners to point out someone's errors.
We used to have a poster here whose grammar, etc, were atrocious. But the content of his posts was authoritative and informative, well worth picking through the language peccadillos. He struck me as someone whose upbringing was less than priviledged, but who made the best life he knew how.
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
While I'm a fan of well-written posts with words spelled correctly, I believe on a site like this, it's just plain bad manners to point out someone's errors.
York1 John
CSSHEGEWISCH No we aren't, but good spelling and composition go a long way in helping get your point across.
No we aren't, but good spelling and composition go a long way in helping get your point across.
I agree completely. If you aren't having to strain your brain to figure out what the poster is trying to say. makes it much easier and quicker to read the post. Also, to me using poor grammar and 15 abbreviations per sentence and generally doing a poor job of writing tells me that one of these is true of the writer: 1) he is too stupid to know the difference, 2) he is too lazy to do it right, or 3) he doesn't respect his audience enough to do it right.
tree68 Backshop I used to be accused of being a grammar nazi when I would call someone out on their capitalization, spelling, punctuation and grammar. They'd always excuse it by saying "I was in a hurry". I'd just laugh and shake my head because if you really know how to write correctly, it doesn't take any extra time and it comes naturally. Exactly. If you're used to doing it right, it's automatic. I also blame texting, where things like capitalization, punctuation, and spelling seem to be completely optional. Was it here we had the discussion about one space or two after the period ending a sentence? Maybe it was on FB... Many times I'll catch myself having muscle memory overriding my brain, turning "the" into "they," and the like.
Exactly. If you're used to doing it right, it's automatic.
I also blame texting, where things like capitalization, punctuation, and spelling seem to be completely optional.
Was it here we had the discussion about one space or two after the period ending a sentence? Maybe it was on FB...
Many times I'll catch myself having muscle memory overriding my brain, turning "the" into "they," and the like.
Johnny
Miningman The Kalmbach staff must be having a good laugh about this considering even just the spelling that goes on in the Forums, let alone the rest of it. Glass houses, stones and black kettles come to mind.
The Kalmbach staff must be having a good laugh about this considering even just the spelling that goes on in the Forums, let alone the rest of it. Glass houses, stones and black kettles come to mind.
You're comparing apples and oranges; we're not getting paid to write here.
SALfan-- Great story. Life in the '50's!
Is there a modern day equivalent? Crummy dishwashers set for off peak hours and windmills shaking the place up, solar panels sliding off the roof?
York1 daveklepper As soon as we had a desktop computer, with DOS and Microsoft Word 5.0, and large real floppy disks, I jumped at the chance to use it, instead of a typewriter. This was several years before Windows. Same here. The college papers I typed had to be perfect, which meant erasing, correcting, etc. The worst was that back then, footnotes were at the bottoms of pages. You had to estimate the space needed at the bottom of the page for each footnote, and if the cited quote came near the bottom, it was a headache trying to figure out if the footnote would fit. When word processors first came out, I immediately switched from the typewriter. I loved that footnotes could be automatically formatted. Of course, shortly after that, professors began accepting cited works to be on a page at the end of the paper. Lucky students.
daveklepper As soon as we had a desktop computer, with DOS and Microsoft Word 5.0, and large real floppy disks, I jumped at the chance to use it, instead of a typewriter. This was several years before Windows.
Same here. The college papers I typed had to be perfect, which meant erasing, correcting, etc. The worst was that back then, footnotes were at the bottoms of pages. You had to estimate the space needed at the bottom of the page for each footnote, and if the cited quote came near the bottom, it was a headache trying to figure out if the footnote would fit.
When word processors first came out, I immediately switched from the typewriter. I loved that footnotes could be automatically formatted.
Of course, shortly after that, professors began accepting cited works to be on a page at the end of the paper. Lucky students.
My mother taught Home Economics, and nearly every summer went to summer school working on getting a higher degree (she ended up with a Master's and some work toward her Ph. D). She didn't type, but my father did, and they couldn't afford to pay someone to type her papers, so my father got stuck with the job. He had one of those boat-anchor Royal manuals from the late '50's or early '60's that would shake the whole old house we were living in. He hated, loathed and despised footnotes. He had been a sergeant in the Army during WWII, and his vocabulary of profanity was wide and deep. Many a night us boys were lulled to sleep by that typewriter pounding away, shaking the whole house and my father swearing in a way that would make most sailors faint dead away.
daveklepperAs soon as we had a desktop computer, with DOS and Microsoft Word 5.0, and large real floppy disks, I jumped at the chance to use it, instead of a typewriter. This was several years before Windows.
As soon as we had a desktop computer, with DOS and Microsoft Word 5.0, and large real floppy disks, I jumped at the chance to use it, instead of a typewriter. This was several years before Windows.
Flintlock763) An ability to write!
Sliding in to OT territory: I regret that my son, who had a fantastic imagination, never got a creative writing class in high school. I can only wonder what would have come from a knowledge of how to properly format a story. I was of little help, and I'm not sure he'd have listened to me anyhow...
I still use a manual typewriter down in my train room. Need something to type out the train orders. I actually have two. The one in use is an off-brand portable. The other is a large old Royal. It's missing the piece that holds the ribbon spool in place.
Trains, and others, getting captions wrong is nothing new. I remember one 40 years ago in Trains that stood out to me. I'm sure it was a case of "conventional wisdom" where the writer figured it was the way things were done everywhere.
Jeff
By the way, anyone remember the old-school qualifications to be a good journalist? This is where I really wish DPM was still alive, he'd know right away!
1) A nose for news.
2) A good-quality typewriter.
3) An ability to write!
4) A good strong desk with a bottle of scotch (or bourbon) in one of the drawers.
Ah, the old days of journalism, now, as the late, lamented Lucius Beebe would have said, "Gone with the snows of yesteryear!"
My first introduction to typewriters was a Hermes Rocket, which still had its case but not its little retractable carrying handle. That was a delightful little thing -- and of course you could write with it anywhere, needs no power or batteries, made clear and legible typescript, and was made (and worked) like a Swiss watch.
My second real typewriter, a Christmas present when I first started having to write longer high-school reports and papers, was one of the Adler mechanicals with the large and extremely legible pica face. This was the tracker-action organ of typewriters: you really needed muscle action and coordination to press those keys down, rather than on my sister's electric where there was servo typebar actuation, but it DID have your choice of black or red for emphasis, could be adjusted to cut a fairly amazing number of stencils, and produced very clear output for a fabric ribbon that 'never ran out unexpectedly'. Gave me fingers and wrists of steel, that's for sure.
Now, by being in the right time at the right place, I acquired (1) an IBM Executive typewriter (the one with variable space but using typebars, with the extended carriage) and (2) the entire Varityper setup, including something like 30 of the little font plates, that my high school used for newsletters. (It was the electric drive for the Varityper, in fact, that gave me the idea for spring Geneva-mechanism drive for high-speed steam locomotive valve gear). This was perfectly serviceable but, as noted, you had quite a bit of recourse to the eraser shield, the Wite-out bottle, and other things for correcting. And you wrote things in drafts, with extensive hand revision and careful measurement between them, and footnoting instead of end-noting was a misery. I do not now remember if the Executive had an erase ribbon in it, but with a little reflection I can almost remember how you used the little 'finger' to calculate the number of spaces to add or subtract to get a justified right margin when you typed the whole thing over again. And we thought that was a magic and wonderful capability!
The Olivetti, as well as having the one-line buffer, had the delightful option of easy snap-in ribbons in clean carbon, a variety of colors, and actual fabric good for multiple passes. It had a very competent lift-off tape correction, too ... but I seldom used that for corrections, as I'd catch the fumble-fingering on that running 15-character display and easily correct it ... and I thought that was a wonderful and magical capability. As part of the automatics, it featured true proportional spacing if you had one of the corresponding printwheels ... and that was a wonderful and magical capability. (And you could type white characters on black with a special setting, too, although it wasted carbon ribbon almost as fast as those 'dot-matrix graphics programs' did.)
Now, along about this time I had the serendipitous privilege of walking through the Columbia law school just at the time they decided their Lexitron word processor was 'economically unfixable'. It took four big people to move the base unit of that thing (I think we weighed it at 890lb!) but it is still the only CRT I've ever seen with a full legal-size green character display (implemented in two separate graphics boards on the S-100 bus!) not to mention that you rolled the text up and down on the screen with a mechanical platen with knobs, and it signalled end of approaching line with a solenoid-actuated ding bell. I won't go into the printer, but it was fabulously complicated. (As an amusing commentary on technology, when something finally failed that I couldn't diagnose and fix without documentation or special board-level tools ... I took the S-100 cards out of the base unit (there were something like 21 populated slots in there), framed and sold them as computer art, and bought the Mac IIx, LaserWriter IIntx, and 16" color display with the proceeds... complete with the 80MB drive -- how could there be that much storage in the whole world, and all of it for meeeee -- EIGHT WHOLE MEGABYTES OF RAM, and future-proofed for typesetting (via LaTex)TI with its factory-installed A/UX option and accompanying $495 five-foot shelf of documentation ... mind you, this was 1.0, before it 'did' the Mac user interface at all; perhaps needless to say it was not long before I reformatted, as I recall with something newer than 6.0.1, from 'someone's' cloned system installation disk set, with a copy of Word 4 already several generations old from one of the downstairs labs, and never looked back!) I should note, though, that I still use "SASH Partition" as the name for one of my drives...
(Humiliatingly enough -- I always wanted an IBM Composer, and finally bought one to restore. That was the first machine I encountered that was too complex for me to even comprehend, let alone repair, let alone adjust and calibrate. That it could be marketed and sold and field-repaired is astounding enough; my hat is off to anyone who could design and DFM such a thing.)
In college in the early 70s, I made quite a bit of money typing papers for students. I charged 15¢ a page. I could do 5 - 6 pages an hour, depending on footnotes, etc.
Of course, the college bar charged 15¢ for a glass of draft beer. Funny how that worked out.
If you want to find out just how bad of a 'keyboardist' you are - use a manual typewriter. No backspace key that eliminates the mistakes and gives you a 'clean sheet' from that point on.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
Flintlock76 ...found their aunts and uncles old manual typewriters ...
When I was at Tinker AFB, there was a manual typewriter that made the rounds on our floor, and probably through the entire barracks. After I left, I got a report that one could still hear it being used around the barracks.
It was tired, so it took a little more "umph" to make the impressions.
When the ex was taking secretarial courses at the local community college, we went all in and picked up a current (at the time) electric. It's still around here someplace, but as I recall, the spacebar came loose. Probably an easy fix, if I wanted to.
Wow Mod-man, you had the "Super-Deluxe" with all the bells, whistles, and warp drive capability.
My first (and only) typewriter circa 1971 was a plain old straight from Value House mechanical Remington. Nothing to plug in or burn out, mistakes were corrected by typing on eraseable onionskin paper with the appropriate eraser or a bottle of "White-Out." Low tech indeed, but it worked for the next 25 years.
I remember a great Christmas at Lady Firestorm's mothers house. Lady F's nieces Stephanie and Janine, ages 11 and 7 respectively, found their aunts and uncles old manual typewriters while rummaging through the closets. It didn't take them long to figure out how to use them, they were familiar with computer keyboards so it wasn't too much of a leap.
"Be careful with those, kids," I said, "They're relics from the Plasticine Era, when dinosaurs like your aunts and uncles roamed the Earth!"
Smart kids! They got the joke immediately!
DeggestyI will say that I do not miss my typewriter, especially since it is much easier to correct errors (if I catch them before transmitting them).
I do still miss my first 'real' typewriter, which was an Olivetti ET221 (it's Darth Vader's typewriter) precisely because it had a one-line display allowing you to correct typing mistakes, and automatically returned and started printing a justified (straight right margin) line in proportional space without needing any kind of hard carriage return or line feed action from me while I was continuing to type at speed with my fingers on the keys.
And I could read the display in the dark, too, as it was done with one of those green fluorescent plasma displays...
Of course any modern computer is infinitely preferable to a typewriter of nearly any sort -- I am still impressed looking at the first one I used regularly, Word 4 for the Macintosh, and that is still a perfectly functional word-processing program for a great many needs, nearly 35 years later.
I correct my spelling errors when I see them. If Kalmbach has a chuckle over my typos, more power to them. When you are 88 your eyesight might not be up to avoiding typos yourself.
I was on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, an unpaid position, where I did edit many professional papers. At that time my eyesight was a lot better.
But Kalmbach's photo editor is paid to do his job, and I hope the criticism on this thread prompts him to check facts a better and explore mutliple honest sources of information better.
You can check on my abiliies easily for free at www.proaudioencyclopedia.com
Or wait for the forthcoming November 2020 issue of Acoustics Today.
tree68 BaltACD Are we sure the stories aren't being composed on a 'smartphone' with otto correct? Pardon the minor "correction" - I couldn't resist. Not to diss Kalmbach - their editing is usually second to none, but I suspect the upcoming generation of journalists is only marginally familiar with actually typing on a keyboard, and would be completely lost on a manual typewriter. "Whadya mean it doesn't automatically word wrap, spel czech, and I have to push that lever over to go to the next line?"
BaltACD Are we sure the stories aren't being composed on a 'smartphone' with otto correct?
Pardon the minor "correction" - I couldn't resist.
Not to diss Kalmbach - their editing is usually second to none, but I suspect the upcoming generation of journalists is only marginally familiar with actually typing on a keyboard, and would be completely lost on a manual typewriter.
"Whadya mean it doesn't automatically word wrap, spel czech, and I have to push that lever over to go to the next line?"
I will say that I do not miss my typewriter, especially since it is much easier to correct errors (if I catch them before transmitting them).
BaltACDAre we sure the stories aren't being composed on a 'smartphone' with otto correct?
samfp1943One has to wonder.....Where in the World has Spel Czech gone????
It's alive and well in Quick Reply. Of course, you don't have most other features.
_____________
"A stranger's just a friend you ain't met yet." --- Dave Gardner
Deggesty samfp1943 Deggesty Ah, if Miss Rosemary Entringer had married and given birth to a daughter who had the same qualifications as her mother--and now had tghe same position as her mother had! One has to wonder.....Where in the World has Spel Czech gone???? Yes, Sam, I wonder why and where. I try to remember to check before I send my compositions out to the world, but....
samfp1943 Deggesty Ah, if Miss Rosemary Entringer had married and given birth to a daughter who had the same qualifications as her mother--and now had tghe same position as her mother had! One has to wonder.....Where in the World has Spel Czech gone????
Deggesty Ah, if Miss Rosemary Entringer had married and given birth to a daughter who had the same qualifications as her mother--and now had tghe same position as her mother had!
Ah, if Miss Rosemary Entringer had married and given birth to a daughter who had the same qualifications as her mother--and now had tghe same position as her mother had!
One has to wonder.....Where in the World has Spel Czech gone????
Yes, Sam, I wonder why and where.
I try to remember to check before I send my compositions out to the world, but....
Are we sure the stories aren't being composed on a 'smartphone' with auto correct?
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.