the_perks_of_proofreading epitome of incomprehensibility In a proposed design for some product packaging: "Each tab (or sloth) is attached to a card." Poor sloth! 131203 ... e_o_i "If we compare oil to reasonable energy..." :) 151026 ... e_o_i None right now, I'm afraid, except for an extra fifty bucks or so in my salary. Grumble grumble. Why the grumble? I'm staying late at work proofreading this medical article. I don't want to go home until I'm finished the initial revisions. Tomorrow morning I can look at it with sleep-refreshed eyes and correct any incorrect corrections. Okay, so I did learn that "ileum" is the name of a symptom, specifically the stopping of peristalsis. Peristalsis is part of digestion, the movement of future poop through the intestines. There are mechanisms that move things along, but these can be stopped by the aftereffects of major surgery, especially abdominal surgery, or illness. The Wikipedia page said it's usually treated by stopping food for a couple of days and hooking patients up to IVs instead, but there are ideas on how to make it go away faster. One idea is to have patients chew gum, which would trick their digestive systems into thinking they were eating, and the intestines would think, "Oh, OK, food's on it's way - better start up the old peristalsis!" See? Exciting stuff. It reminds me of when I was a kid and I'd keep an old medical journal under my pillow for the thrills of finding something vaguely sex-related... or, more likely, a disease I'd scare myself into thinking I might have. The perks of hypochondria. Why am I relatively mellow about health now? Most of the time. Although I really shouldn't have eaten mostly sugar today. Plus, I've a serious deficit of green leafy vegetables. I crave parsley, but that stuff is damned expensive this season. Lettuce too. Spinach? Frozen spinach it is. Once I get this done, I'll reward myself by buying spinach tomorrow. Yum! Now I'm excited about spinach. Life is beautiful after all. 160204 ... e_o_i No. Wrong. "Ileum" is just another name for the third portion of the small intestine. "Ileus" is it not working. 160204 ... e_o_i Finally going home at 10:30. Caffeine crash and I'm tired. Still there is a results sheet to be proofread, but that should be fast(er). 160204 ... nr that sounds like my proofreading schedule the past few days. which is difficult and tiring sometimes, but the whole american-money making while living in canada makes it more appealing. 160204 ... e_o_i Tired high-five! What kind of writing is it? Technical? Magazine articles? General literary-publisher output? Student papers? Dense, incomprehensible medical-student papers?? ...Yes, yes, poor me. At least this spring my friend is working on a kid's book, so I'll get a bit of fiction to do. Actually, never mind my random grumbling last night: I DO learn interesting things when I get to proofread scientific articles. There was one from an upper-year undergrad or master's student in bioengineering talking about CRISPR gene editing; I corrected some small grammar/spelling issues without actually understanding much of the article, but a few days later the science radio show Quirks and Quarks was discussing the exact same thing, and I was like, "Oh, NOW I get it!" Basically, CRISPR is an immune response that targets particular patterns in DNA and "unzips" them, similar to the "search and replace" computer function (their analogy). It has interesting potential to treat various diseases. (The student whose paper I edited had mixed results from her experiment - some baby mice that she was supposed to cure died instead.) Anyway, I'm doing this student-paper proofreading for the tutoring centre I work at now, so I'm not getting ALL the cool cash. Mind you, I also work as their secretary, so I have more than full-time work doing other stuff. Oh oh oh, but even when I was paid very badly ($60 to edit a 30-page online travel magazine, would you believe it) there were perks. I was going over an article by someone who went on a submarine trip off a beautiful Caribbean island, and I was getting more and more jealous of the writer, until she mentioned meeting some "sea_enemas." Moral: DON'T GO TO CURACAO OR THE SEA ENEMAS WILL GET YOU. In all caps, too. 160205 ... e_o_i Neoliberal policies result in people "losing their gobs." Gobs of what? 160405 ... past gobs of dignity. it just slops off. unsightly. 160406 ... e_o_i In an education essay: "children surfing from learning disabilities." In another exercise, asking people to volunteer: "your contrition is appreciated." 171018 ... raze (i'm now picturing kids on surfboards with worried expressions on their faces, trying to evade the personification of different learning disabilities that all sort of resemble evil "sesame street" characters) 171019 ... e_o_i Ha! Surfing from a surfeit of free association. I also discovered that ever dumbening has a good long page here on "surfing" - I skimmed it, a rock skipping over the surface, but it was full of nice images. Now I've got "weather students are walking or biking". Good old weather students. 171021 ... e_o_i Not particularly funny this time, but poetic: "clearfield" instead of "clarified". (There's my compound word fetish again. Plus, as Calvin said, verbing weirds language.) 171027 ... e_o_i One of my students had her first art "exception" in France. 171110 ... e_o_i I am working on a longish essay right now. Sadly, there is no "refer" rendered as "reefer" here, but a few poetic typos and autocorrects blossom like sparse flowers in a muddy spring field. 180306 ... e_o_i A lunch instead of a launch renders things more food-related. "Lunch in T minus 20! 19! 18!" 180307 ... e_o_i Donald TRAMP. A sincere mistake. This is the best. 180307 ... e_o_i grammar_gremlins (The creatures that live in Microsoft Word and underline things in blue or green. My father calls them gremlins.) 180510 ... e_o_i Tagline: An exam for education students. A deadline. Limited practice time. Who will be the first casualty? And the answer is "untuned parents." It's true. My student wrote that she welcomes "all new and retuning parents." The untuned ones do not seem welcome. 180704 ... e_o_i "respect sexual members and their rights" My heart goes out to all the genitals deprived of free speech! (Oh, wait, my heart's not allowed out. It's grounded.) (The student meant to write sexual minorities; the subject of this program was homophobia and bullying, which is serious enough. But this!) 180705 ... e_o_i "There are many forms of Homophobia such as insulating..." It's offensive because of the assumption that gay people are always cold. It is very insulating to us.* *To be precise, bisexuals are either too hot or too cold. (It's true today, at least: office is Arctic, outdoors tropics.) 180705 ... e_o_i "That may lead them to live in an isolating society." Or ice-olating, amirite? Let's not make that ICE-olating, though. Donald Tramp should get a surprise Ice Bucket Challenge. (Cold water poured on him. This is not a death wish, it's a fashion statement. My Chemical Romance converts dihydrogen monoxide to Christianity like there's no tomorrow.) 180705 ... e_o_i This is a different document: a proposal to set up a health clinic. Serious topic, but again... ...the lake of a screening program will defiantly lead to an increase in cancer rates... ...Disability-adjusted life years are calculated according to a universal set of slandered weights... 180708 ... e_o_i It took me a while to realize that "collaborative echo system" actually meant "collaborative ecosystem." I was thinking, "I've heard 'echo chamber' as a metaphor, but isn't that mostly negative?" 180709 ... e_o_i The poor oncologist is "analized." This paper is like a how-to of typos. Typose. Tying a pose to a rose is a rose is a rose. 180709 ... e_o_i HE ALWAYS SPELLS "WHETHER" AS "WITHER." ALWAYS. 180709 ... e_o_i There is a "summery" before the appendix. But of course. 180709 ... e_o_i Oh, and a charge nurse was a "charged nurse" up above. Besides the oncologist, it was another example of a clinic-worker's role that could be "analized" (I'm not making this up). 180709 ... e_o_i "affecting women's heath" "Such system is belt in the essences of collaboration" "using a wildly accepted reference standard" 180709 ... e_o_i "Herbal nouns" was me (hangs head in mock shame). I meant verbal nouns, but what's not to love about an oregano-scented word? 180808 ... unhinged autocorrect can make my lack of proofreading pretty embarrassing sometimes 180808 ... e_o_i What's really embarrassing is that I recently saw the typo-ridden article I was writing about in '18 and found that the first sentence, THE FIRST SENTENCE, had the word "in" where it clearly should've been "is" - I don't know why I didn't spot this!!! Why did I even open the file? Maybe by mistake (while searching for the other cancer article I was doing earlier this week) or maybe to check something. Curing_cancer, one typo at a time (unless it's a really easy-to-spot one, apparently). 200604 ... e_o_i I just learned there's a type of protein called "sonic hedgehog" (named after the video game character). I honestly thought one of the paper's authors had put it in as a joke. 201129 ... e_o_i Determining the "likely hood" of a chemical reaction. 211027 what's it to you? who go blather from