RE: Priorities (was RE: Yahoo has no staff tech writers)

[John Posada <JPosada -at- book -dot- com>]

John is a good writer, based on all I've seen from him over the years. So
when he says he puts grammar at number 6 on his list, and by his own
admission doesn't always make it past numbers 3 or 4, I really doubt that
the untended sentences are complete gibberish.

John, correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't you talking about subtle stuff,
where the clarity of the message is not at stake? Things like this:

"Make sure each of the icons are visible on your screen."

-------------------------------

Correct....I'm talking about obsession over grammar from the standpoint of
grammar.

Things like:

- spending a precious hour obsessing on whether a sentence should use
"which" or "that", when that hour could be used to verify that they didn't
change the all the IP addresses for the 18 servers in your network....or
just plain verifying that there are still 18 servers.

- spending 30 minutes to rewrite a paragraph so that it doesn't have only
one bullet after it when that time could have been spend verifying that the
network server is a quad CPU instead of a dual CPU.

- spending all morning running a spell-check for the 3rd time on a 600
page/30 chapter FM book looking for less than 5 new misspellings in 600
pages while the burning of a CD is held up because they are waiting for the
PDF

- taking even 3 minutes to worry about whether I'll hurt someone's feelings
if I markup someone's grammar with a red pen rather than a green pen.

Are these so tough?

John Posada
Senior Technical Writer
Barnes&Noble.com
jposada -at- book -dot- com
212-414-6656
 "Be accurate...the 4am wakeup call you prevent could be your manager's"


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