Work: cheerful

It was one of those satisfying days in which I remember that my job calls for omniscience, arithmetic, and sanity-checking. Google helps.

Everything I was working on today was proofreading stuff that's supposed to have been through at least one copyediting pass. Things I found today, in addition to minor typos, spelling glitches, and the sort of error introduced when a sentence is edited or a paragraph shortened and the consequences not checked adequately, included:

• a very nice picture of hieroglyphics, illustrating text about the code of Hammurabi


• the claim that Ethan Allen had been imprisoned in Britain from 1775 through the end of the American Revolution and—in the same paragraph—the true statement that he addressed the Continental Congress in 1778 [1]


• a paragraph on the Olympics of 736 BCE that mentioned a marathon, and said it was the tenth rather than eleventh Olympiad (fencepost error), and


• the statement that the Rosetta Stone was created to enable translation among the three languages/scripts found on it

The only one I really minded was the Ethan Allen paragraph, because that prompted "has anyone read this text?"

I also got massive thank-yous and praise for offering someone a hand during the morning, because I knew the pages for the project I'd be working on weren't due until at least noon. Edie is generous and friendly, and she saved me from boredom.

[1] Google found not only when he'd been released, but the likely source of the error, so I emailed a correction to that Website.

Work: cheerful

It was one of those satisfying days in which I remember that my job calls for omniscience, arithmetic, and sanity-checking. Google helps.

Everything I was working on today was proofreading stuff that's supposed to have been through at least one copyediting pass. Things I found today, in addition to minor typos, spelling glitches, and the sort of error introduced when a sentence is edited or a paragraph shortened and the consequences not checked adequately, included:

• a very nice picture of hieroglyphics, illustrating text about the code of Hammurabi


• the claim that Ethan Allen had been imprisoned in Britain from 1775 through the end of the American Revolution and—in the same paragraph—the true statement that he addressed the Continental Congress in 1778 [1]


• a paragraph on the Olympics of 736 BCE that mentioned a marathon, and said it was the tenth rather than eleventh Olympiad (fencepost error), and


• the statement that the Rosetta Stone was created to enable translation among the three languages/scripts found on it

The only one I really minded was the Ethan Allen paragraph, because that prompted "has anyone read this text?"

I also got massive thank-yous and praise for offering someone a hand during the morning, because I knew the pages for the project I'd be working on weren't due until at least noon. Edie is generous and friendly, and she saved me from boredom.

[1] Google found not only when he'd been released, but the likely source of the error, so I emailed a correction to that Website.