Re: Your Web site

[Mary McWilliams Johnson <mary -at- SUPERCONNECT -dot- COM>]

Thanks for your email. I took a look at your Web site and find that it has
some helpful information on it. However, apparently you have been very
careless with punctuation and spelling. Since you are writing to tech
writers, it would probably be a good idea to go over your text again or
perhaps ask one of your buddies to proof it for you. I'll mention a few
examples...

"Therefore: write about..."  Should be: "Therefore, write about..."

"A special problem is, that..." Should be: "A special problem is that..."

"...you most often..." Should be: "...often..." (most often is a slang
expression)

"Be aware, that very often nobody as a complete oversight over the product
it's use and applications.
        Should be: "Be aware that very often nobody has as complete an
oversight over the product, its use and applications, as you do."

I do realise that in some countries (such as England) recognize differences
in usage of the English language, both in spelling and punctuation, but the
things I've pointed out are basic on both continents.

I'm just pointing these things out so that you won't lose the effectiveness
of your message due to simple spelling and punctuation errors.

BTW, you might find my WordSmith Web site interesting. It offers tips on
correct English usage:
         http://www.superconnect.com/wordsmit/

And I've added a  new section to my site - "Mary's Tips on Designing Web Sites"
        http://www.superconnect.com/writershelp.htm/

Cordially, Mary

================


At 10:20 AM 5/6/98 +1, Peter Ring, PRC wrote:
>Mary McWilliams Johnson <mary -at- SUPERCONNECT -dot- COM> wrote as an irritated
>"maybe slightly TAN" (at least for English-only speakers) comment to
>the subject: Correct usage "i.e." and "e.g.":
>
>> I'm copying your complete message below so that you can see how it came
>> through in Eudora. I don't know what email program you use, but apparently
>> it was attempting to format symbols in some fancy way - a way that didn't
>> translate into ASCII text.
>> >
>> >There seems to be an inconsistent usage of the Latin abbreviations,
>> >"i=2Ee=2E= "=20 and "e=2Eg=2E"
>>
>> >I am compiling a civil engineering guide and before doing so wish
>> >to develo= p=20 a set ...
>
>This frequently happens, mainly in e-mails using the non-English
>characters above ASCII 128. Most likely it is caused by conversion
>errors between the 7-bit characters transferred by the Internet, and
>the full 8-bit ASCII character set. If this is correct, it's
>probably not your e-mail reader which makes it, but maybe (partly?)
>the settings of the senders e-mail programme. There are two different
>versions of the problem, A and B:
>
>A Here "=" at the end of a line is a soft NewLine, and "=XX" is a
>  character where XX is the HEX code of the character (00..FF).
>  Examples: =20 is ASCII 32 = " " (space). =2E is ASCII 46 = ".".
>
>B Characters above ASCII 127 are translated to another character
>  according to (what looks like) a fixed pattern. Example: The
>  German u-umlaut is shown as a "power of 3". The major problem is,
>  that in some cases different characters are translated into the
>  same character, and some characters are translated into standard
>  characters below ASCII 128, even common letters like "s".
>
>If you have frequent problems of this kind - or with copying e-mails
>into a word processor - you can use my little shareware programme
>TrimTXT. The current version 1.0 can translate type A (the =XX type).
>Version 1.1 (currently in an unreleased "late alpha") will handle
>most of the type B "translations", too. TrimTXT is available from
>http://isa.dknet.dk/~prc/software/index.html
>
>Greetings from Denmark
>
>Peter Ring
>PRC (Peter Ring Consultants)
>- specialists in user friendly manuals and audits on manuals.
>  prc -at- isa -dot- dknet -dot- dk
>- the "User Friendly Manuals" website with links, bibliography, list
>  of prof. associations, and tips for technical writers:
>  http://isa.dknet.dk/~prc/
>- text cleaning software, e.g. for reading difficult e-mails:
>  http://isa.dknet.dk/~prc/software/index.html
>
>