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 Post Posted: Wed Nov 17, 2010 10:16 am 
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I also vote to consult the author. When I worked as a tech editor I always warned people, especially those who needed a fast turnaround, that they'd better be accessible by email because I was going to ask them a million questions, sometimes about the same part over and over, and it would seem to them that they were breaking it down to pure idiot level for me, but to trust my professional experience that it needed to be torn down and built back up that much.

If, however, you cannot consult the author for whatever reason (either by asking them directly or leaving them a note when you return the file, saying "I rewrote {passage} as {passage} but if that is not correct please fix it") then I vote to leave it as is. Better to leave it incomprehensible than risk introducing an error.

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 Post Posted: Wed Nov 17, 2010 12:15 pm 
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If the sentence means what arcosh thinks it means, then wouldn't it be contradicting the next sentence? I mean if it's just dumb statistics that duh, of course you're more likely to find heavier rain the longer you wait, then you can't draw the conclusion that the rain is in fact getting heavier due to an external force such as global warming.

I think I'll send the author an email and hope she gets back to me. I've asked her to clarify a whole bunch of stuff already, and much of it came back merely as slightly more comprehensible gibberish. I think I lack the sheer obsessive sticklerness for detail to be a professional editor; I do not notice every comma that's out of place, especially not in a 4 page list of references.


weatherwax wrote:
Kea, when in doubt, go ask the author if you can. Cause that sentence is all kinds of wha...? And the last thing you need is someone coming down on you for "changing the meaning."


The whole paper was full of all kinds of whaaa? Mixing up words like "related" with "relevant", and "exist" with "exceed"; mangled grammar, places where it looked like the author(s) began writing one sentence and finished a completely different one; impenetrable jargon; grammatical mangling of impenetrable jargon. I needed Google to make a head or tail of the more jargony paragraphs, and in a couple of places actually had to consult the source the authors were referencing in order to see what the hell they were going on about. The latest version I was sent this morning had been cleaned up quite a lot, but some bits such as the one quoted above were still wtf onna stick.

My point being, I've ventured way into "guess the meaning and hopefully don't maim it" territory already.

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 Post Posted: Wed Nov 17, 2010 12:48 pm 
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Oof. I feel for you, I really do. More than once I've had to make the garbled technical translations of the Germans that employ me legible. I typically work more like inspy, though: ask every stupid question multiple times. That you macheted through that jungle on your own is pretty commendable.

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 Post Posted: Wed Nov 17, 2010 5:08 pm 
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I assumed that the paragraph was part of a b) step of a approach like:

a) Thats the data.
b) Thats obvious statitstics traps one can fall into when analysing it.
c) Thats how we avoid toose traps.
d) Thats what you get, after having avoided the trap.

If this is not how the paper in question is structured, propably my interpretation does not make sense.

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 Post Posted: Fri Nov 19, 2010 10:57 pm 
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I have a question/problem that comes up when I try to buy the new Sluggy book from Indy Planet. I was wondering if anyone else has had the same problem:

I can get to the confirmation stage just fine, I finish up at Paypal and click "Confirm Order" I get sent back to the delivery information section with this error message: "The field Shipping Address State is required"
From what I can tell, Paypal sets the delivery address to "Alberta" and I guess the Indy Planet system wants it as "AB" but there is no way to make Paypal stop doing that and I cannot change it back in the system without starting all over again which will just result in Paypal changing it again. I tried for nearly an hour but I could not figure out how to make it work.

Does anyone else have this problem? More importantly, does anyone know how to get around it so I can buy the new book?

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 Post Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2010 3:24 pm 
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I would be extremely grateful if anyone could help me with a list:

- words that end in the syllable "logs" (e.g. analogs works, blogs doesn't)
- words that end with the letters "the" (e.g. absinthe)

This is for a poem. :zoe:

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 Post Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2010 4:23 pm 
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Words that end in 'logs' as a syllable:

analogs
backlogs
catalogs
dialogs
epilogs
logs
monologs
travelogs

Words that end in 'the':

Bethe
Blythe
Goethe
Lethe
Margrethe
Mouthe
absinthe
bathe
blithe
breathe
clothe
lathe
lithe
loathe
scythe
seethe
sheathe
soothe
sunbathe
swathe
teethe
the
tithe
unclothe
unsheathe
withe
wreathe
writhe

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 Post Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2010 4:31 pm 
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Sweet! Awesome!

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 Post Posted: Sat Dec 11, 2010 9:04 am 
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CCC wrote:
Words that end in 'logs' as a syllable:

analogs
backlogs
catalogs
dialogs
epilogs
logs
monologs
travelogs

Of course, that's only in US English. In the rest of the world, those would mostly end in 'logues', aside from 'backlogs', and 'logs'.

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 Post Posted: Sat Dec 11, 2010 9:56 am 
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That's spelling, though. You still pronounce them the same, more or less, don't you?

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 Post Posted: Sat Dec 11, 2010 11:32 am 
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Yes. Depending on the exact requirement, that might be enough, or it might not.

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 Post Posted: Sat Dec 11, 2010 11:33 am 
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Yes, they are pronounced the same. The extra letters are just there for decoration.

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 Post Posted: Sun Dec 12, 2010 4:19 am 
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I just trawled a spellcheck dictionary (and then pulled out things like 'clogs' and 'flogs' that failed the last syllable test manually). The dictionary in question includes both 'analogs' and 'analogues', but since I was doing a text match the second didn't turn up in the search. (It also includes 'prologues' but for some reason not 'dialogues').

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 Post Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2010 6:01 pm 
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Homologs, holologs. Though really, that latter is kind of obscure in usage.

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 Post Posted: Sat Jan 08, 2011 12:51 am 
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Here is a question I have. Google and other places on the internet are full of scans of old, classic books, and some of them have very nice engravings. The text will be out of copyright, but what about the images? Will they be free to use as well, or does the person who scanned them get ownership of the digital version?

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