On second thought...

I posted earlier that I didn't have much to say after a busy day.

I've had second thoughts about that, because there's something that is bothering me a lot the past few days.

In the past week, maybe week and a half, I've read not one but two books that I checked out of the library that both had the same problem - someone who checked them out before me felt the need to go through and edit the text of the books.

Now, I can sympathize with this urge. I've noticed in the past, oh, five or ten years that books, including some published by very big mainstream publishing houses, seem not to have the editing and proofreading attention that they should have. Typographical errors abound, weird grammatical constructions that I would have thought would be eliminated in proofreading have become more common, and the books just generally don't seem as professionally presented as they used to be. And as they should be, considering what the publishing houses charge for their product these days.

However, and above and beyond the fact that library books are not the property of the people reading them and the readers should therefore not write in them, whoever did the home "editing" in these two books clearly had no idea what they were doing. Not only that, they had no idea what they were doing in the very same way in both cases. If it weren't for the fact that these two books were in different subject areas - one was about the coming of age of the Baby Boomers, and the other was a memoir by singer Eric Burdon - and that they were from two different libraries in two different counties (I picked up one in a local branch and got the other through interlibrary loan), I would suspect that the same person was responsible for the markings in both books.

Whoever did it, they had issues with punctuation. There were commas crossed out, other commas added, and some commas replaced by semicolons. And none of the alterations made any grammatical sense at all. I'm not talking about the dispute over the Oxford comma here. My roommate kept laughing at me because I kept complaining this free-form editing and threatening to throw the books against the wall. In the case of the Baby Boomer book, I got so frustrated at one point that if I hadn't been close to the end of the book I probably would have just given up and returned it to the library before I finished it. It wasn't really that good a book, anyway.

I guess all of this is a long and roundabout way of saying that I don't care what you do with the books you own. I write in my own books all the time (as I think I've mentioned here before); that's my way of having a dialogue with the book and the writer. But, please, please, please...don't write in library books.

That's what God invented sticky-notes for, isn't it?

Oops...

I was supposed to write a blog post today, wasn't I?

And now it's nearly 5 p.m., and I haven't even thought about it, except to put it on my list of things to do this morning when I first got out of bed.

Funny, how time flies when you're having fun.

Or, when you're just busy.

I can't claim that I haven't been having fun today, actually, for all that I've spent most of the day putting the finishing touches on a workshop I have to present to a group of fellow job-seekers tomorrow morning. I really enjoy putting workshops like this together and presenting them. On the other hand, they are a lot of work.

I didn't even put this off until the last minute. I started writing it the middle of last month, when I first got the go-ahead to do it. And I've been working on it along the way. It was substantially finished three or four days ago. Yesterday and today, though, I've been fiddling with it, making a list of the content on the PowerPoint slides that will go with it, and generally making sure that I didn't forget to put anything in.

Well, I've probably forgotten a few things, but at this point, that's just too bad. It will have to stand as it is.

So, tomorrow morning I'm going to be talking to a group of people, many of whom I know, about proofreading resumes and cover letters, and how it isn't a good idea to rely on spell-check and grammar-check programs to do your proofreading for you. I won't bore you with the reasons why it isn't a good idea, but if the point is to submit a professional-looking resume and cover letter, you'll want to do more than that before you send it off, either electronically or by snail mail.

It really is about ready to go. I've got the thing written. I've even gone over it a couple of times. I've got three handouts, including one proofreading exercise, ready to be reproduced and handed out. Participants are also supposed to bring along a copy of their own resumes for another exercise. I don't believe in "workshops" where the attendees just sit and listen to someone talk for an hour and a quarter or however long. I present introductory material, and then the participants...participate.

And so, I'm going to step away from the whole thing for a couple of hours before I get back to the final, final look at it. I better not be making changes at this point, but just seeing that everything is in order.

And tomorrow, after the presentation is over, I'll try to find something of more general interest to write about.

Oh, and if you find any typos or misspellings in this post? I really don't want to know about it.