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I'd like to begin this e-mail by thanking each of you for many helpful and
insightful posts to this list. I've been in lurk mode for the past year
and have gained much from "keeping my mouth shut" and "listening" to the
experts.
Well, I am now de-lurking because I have a small problem and I'm not sure
how to deal with it.
The situation: I'm currently working on a short-term contract basis
converting a tutorial, manual, and various other documentation to on-line
for a small start-up company. There is one other Tech Writer working here
as well.
So far I have converted only the 24 page tutorial. The reason: There were
so many punctuation, spelling, and formatting errors left by the other
Tech Writer that I had to do a major clean-up job as I converted. And
yes, I was given the final draft. (I can't wait to see the 150 page manual
- yea.)
I mentioned to the client that there were some small problems in the
tutorial and I'd be happy to go into the original and clean them up.
Well, that's what I'm doing right now. The problem is, that as I'm
cleaning up the punctuation, spelling and formatting errors I'm also
finding some pretty amazing grammatical errors.
For example:
"Republishing opens the publish screen and you need to tell
it to find the new keyword you just assigned, so press
the Update Keys button. Then you will see your new
keyword(s) listed in the keywords field of the publish
screen, and then press Publish."
This paragraph is part of a bulleted list and, thus, a step in a certain
procedure.
Does anyone else see something wrong with that paragraph or am I just
being picky?
If I'm not "just being picky" what would you all recommend I do about it?
Do I tell the client? Do I tell the agent who placed us both here? Or do
I just keep my mouth shut and not worry about it because it's not my
problem....although essentially it is.
Suggestions? Comments? Expert Advice?
Thank you in advance.
Randi Figueredo
randi -at- nwlink -dot- com
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