Category: General

Linguists, however, are slowly coming to discover the joys of a free and searchable corpus of maybe 10 trillion words that is available to anyone with an internet connection: the world wide web.

I took part in last week’s STC web seminar on pre-emptive project planning by John Hedtke.

Found it practical and useful.

His main points:

Plan ahead
The real problem is the projects you don’t know about that land on your desk suddenly and without warning.

Keep it simple
Use a simple excel sheet to track your current and upcoming projects instead of project tracking software.
Project tracking software depends on clear, stated dependencies that do not change frequently.
Technical communications has multiple interconnected dependencies that can change daily, sometimes hourly.

Gather information about projects that officially don’t exist yet
Use informal and formal ways to find out what projects might become real.

Distribute your project plan to everybody except sales.

Communicate
Talk to everyone at all levels. Ask probing questions. Don’t believe the official pronouncements. Check them out with the folks in the trenches

stumbled across this entry at Language Log:

[…] The Elements of Style offers prejudiced pronouncements on a rather small number of topics, frequently unsupported, and unsupportable, by evidence. It simply isn’t true that the constructions they instruct you not to use are not used by good writers. Take just one illustrative example, the advice not to use which to begin a restrictive relative clause (the kind without the commas, as in anything else which you might want). But the truth is that once E.B. White stopped pontificating and went back to writing his (excellent) books, he couldn’t even follow this advice himself. or should he; it’s stupid advice). You can find the beginning of his book Stuart Little on the official E.B. White website; and you can see him breaking his own rule in the second paragraph. That isn’t the only such example.

recommends the following 2 books:

• Proper Grammar by Ronald Wardhaugh, published by Basil Blackwell in 1999 – about grammatical correctness
• Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage – alternative to S & W

it’s sunny and cold. just right for jogging in the woods. did about 3km. it feels good to have the cold fresh air rushing in. Maxwell is right: Motivation comes when you get started.

i’ve started cleaning up my olde laptop (4+ years old). there’s no space left on the hard disk. it doesn’t shut down on its own. and crashes every so often. i’ve made a backup of all my files and emails. next step: re-install the os. or linux. i’m thinking of trying to install linux instead of sm windows. but i don’t know if it’ll recognize the olde hardware components.