Editing

Some to tea to celebrate Jim.
Emeryville, California - January 2005

As a technical writer, I sometimes have to edit things other people have written, decipher them, turn them into something resembling English, and squeeze them into an existing document. Lots of times this stuff fits in as well as the square piece into an tightly packed tetris board. Usually, people leave me alone with the things I've written, and aside from the occassional change suggested by the company's PC police that make me change "whitelist" and "blacklist," or remove all mention of the word abort, or even avoid any variation of death, people trust me that what I've said is, at least, grammatical. Yesterday, I got a comment from a software developer here, saying, "Page 22 of the guide says '...and is used to change its network settings' is wrong. There is an apostrophe missing in 'it's.'" Yeah, a software developer "correcting" my punctuation. I know this is sort of a common problem, no one knows how to use apostrophes anymore, but still. Come on, this is an easy one.

I know the way things usually go around here, with a heavy lean on boosting the developers' precious and fragile egos. I once suggested to people that the word textize isn't a word and that it should be changed in the software. Guess who lost. Still, I stood my ground on this one, and explained how I had no intention of changing "its." So far, so good. No one has told me otherwise, but I'm sure that hammer'll fall on Monday.

This morning, I got an email from the same developer telling me to add something he wrote to the document, which he felt was great, and ready to go as is, "Scott, I'll make this easy for you," he said, "I did all the work." I wrote back immediately, without even reading what he wrote, thanking him for helping out. Libertade.

His addition? Ready? Hold onto your chair: "Events equal to or worse to the logging priority logging value of logging priorities will be logged using the logging feature of this product. For more information on the logging features of this and this product, please see this section."

Cool, eh? I did not make that up. It's hard to even consider that writing, any effort to assign a language to it aside. I fixed it, and added it to the document. Now, I have to figure out how to explain to him, kindly, gently, when he asks why I changed his art, his masterpiece, his child. I think I'd have probably been better off leaving it alone.

-=-

The shot above is sort of one of a set. The railroad tracks used by Amtrak's Capital Corridor and some shipping lines are barely a block and a half from my office. The Emeryville station, just another few blocks further. There's something about them that has me obsessed with trying to get the great photos of them whenever I have a camera with me. The tracks, the station, the control lights, the foot bridge over it all, all of it.