insomnia, word styles and an overwhelming number of replies

[Robert Nagle <idiotprogrammer -at- austin -dot- rr -dot- com>]

I read yesterday's digest of the list with interest, curiosity and 
amusement. I am a job-seeking writer and I remember playing  with 
different versions of resumes and different styles before settling on a 
final version.   It's really hard to imagine what a potential hiring 
manager might be thinking when weeding out resumes. My suspicion  is 
that a lot of hiring authorities are not tech writers themselves and are 
unlikely to notice the subtleties of a word document except that the 
fact that the margins are straight.

I always chuckle a bit every time I read the obligatory gibe against MS 
Word on this list. Although I prefer Star Office for daily work and 
despise what Microsoft stands for, I'm always delighted when I discover 
a new Word feature. It is quite an amazing product. One writer here made 
a sarcastic remark about the grammar checking function. Just for fun, I 
decided to check it out, and it alerted me to a very subtle grammatical 
mistake I would have probably missed (even though I had to skip 15 other 
"errors" it found).

The responses on this list are delightful and informative(we tech 
writers are a clever bunch, no?). But I rarely get the chance to read 
them; I generally only look at it very late at night when I am trying to 
kill time before going to sleep.  Hey, better than counting sheep, isn't 
it?

It seems absolutely amazing though how many people  actively read and 
reply here.  When I worked at Dell, I  often followed reading lists, but 
gosh, keeping up with this list is practically a full time job in 
itself. How do you guys manage it? I'm a voracious reader and writer, 
but even I find the size and breadth of this list overwhelming for one 
sitting.


--
Robert J. Nagle
Technical Writer, Trainer & Linux Aficionado
11700 Metric Blvd #1420
Austin TX 78758
512 834 4646
rnagle -at- austin -dot- rr -dot- com (backup: rj3nagle -at- yahoo -dot- com)


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