RE: Poll: Is technical writing a sellout or fallback career?

["McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>]

Most of ours have plastic as the default. They'll dig up paper if you
ask. If you present them with canvas bags that you brought, they know
what to do.  
At Costco, they don't do bags, and you are on your own to dig a box out
of their bins, or to provide your own carrying devices. 
So, mostly, nobody even asks any more.

But my semi-tongue-in-cheek point was that we should read the poll
question exactly as it was written, and assume that if a meaning was
intended that could benefit from the presence of a comma, a tech writer
would have ensured that that comma was there.

However, I do admit that my first reaction upon reading the Subject line
of this thread was to stumble, and to dither as to which way it should
be read, second-guessing the OP, if not the Pollster.
But then, I still insist on the serial comma in lists (neither of my
parents was God... nor Ayn Rand), while expecting much of the world to
... not do.

Cheers,

 - Kevin

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Guy K. Haas [mailto:guy -at- hiskeyboard -dot- com]
> Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2008 16:46
> To: McLauchlan, Kevin
> Cc: Guy K. Haas; Combs, Richard; Techwr-l
> Subject: RE: Poll: Is technical writing a sellout or fallback career?
> 
> Well, Kevin, it's like this...
> 
> Time was when our Silicon Valley area clerks did ask
> 
>    "Do you want paper, or plastic?"
> 
> but more and more of late, I'm hearing no comma.
> 
> If I were to use capitalization to represent rising intonation, I'd
render
> the appropriate query as
> 
>    "Do you want PAper, or PLAStic?"
> 
>     di di  di   DAH di di DAH di   (think Morse code)
> 
> but what keeps coming to my ears of late is more like
> 
>    "Do you want paper-or-PLASTIC?"
> 
>     di di  di   di di  di DAH DAH
> 
> We use punctuation to help us represent several dimensions of spoken
> Enlish that have no alphabetic orthography: pitch, pitch-change,
stress,
> pauses, ...
> 
> I wonder whether the clerks who don't "use the comma" can actually
> carry a tune.  They do not use the normal music of the spoken
language.
> 
> --Guy
>    yadda yadda yadda
> 
[snip-diddly]

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