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I often used to see pages that were blank except for "This page blank" in
the military documents that I worked with many years ago. The blank pages
were used as placeholders in long documents that were subject to frequent
amendments. As you can imagine, it was quite an operation to amend
nationally-distributed publications that not only were used and amended by
transient personnel, but which involved security issues around the replaced
pages and so on.
There was so much ridiculing of the "This page blank" idea that someone at
HQ decided to change the message to read "This page blank, except for this
message". More guffaws from the troops, until the message was changed once
more: "This page intentionally blank". Still not quite right. When I left,
our department was issuing documents with "blank" pages containing headers,
footers, page numbers, security classification, amendment number, and the
label "(Placeholder)". Of course, we also had to have "Francais au verso" on
the English pages, and "English on Reverse" on the French pages.
I seem to remember the amendment process for military publications being
fairly foolproof otherwise.
--Beth
Beth Agnew
Senior Technical Writer, InSystems Technologies Inc.
65 Allstate Parkway, Suite 100 Tel: (905) 513-1400 ext. 280
Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R 9X1 Fax: (905) 513-1419 mailto:bagnew -at- insystems -dot- com Visit us at: http://www.insystems.com
