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 Tuesday, 12 July 2005  |  The job of me

posted at 05:00 PM | | [1] |

As I edit I keep an informal (mental) list of edits that I make frequently. Moving "only" is one, as noted before. Here are a couple more:
  • Changing capital letters to lowercase letters. There seems to be a strong urge to capitalize anything that sounds remotely like a name. (As I've said before, we call this "German capitals.") Today, for example, I edited this, and perhaps you can see where I made some adjustments:

    Updateable Full Pre-compilation   This is similar to the Non-Updateable Full Pre-Compilation, except that UI elements such as .aspx pages and .ascx controls retain all their UI code and inline script if any exists.

  • Taking advantage of the possessive. I very frequently change something like "the Text property of the Button control" to "the Button control's Text property." This is a minor change, but it reduces the number ("amount") of prepositional phrases in a sentence, and trust me, there are still plenty left in an average sentence around here. I'm curious about this one, whether a) the possessive is considered a little too informal by most people for technical writing or b) the possessive (aka genitive case) is simply on the wane in contemporary English.

  • Passive. The well-known issue of changing a bunch of passive to simply include "you": "The control is dragged onto the page and its Text property is set to 'Foo'." There is a great fear of You, I guess.

  • Removing you and the possessive. All this said, the possessive is alive and well in the form of "your" -- "deploy the application to your Web server," "send a response to your user," etc. Of course, sometimes it's appropriate: "your application." But unless the possession is obvious and unambiguous (as is not true with a Web server, which could be someone else's), and it's really possession (not with "your user"), I eschew the use of "your."
Of course, this is just the copyediting stuff. The developmental editing is loads more interesting than this, but it's harder to capture the commonality of certain types of edits. However, I'll try to tackle that one soon.
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