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My supervisor (for lack of a better term) found an alleged "cause and effect" exercise that was pure post hoc ergo propter hoc [1] and asked me to find something to replace it with. The constraint was that it couldn't be just anything, it had to be text from the section that this piece of the workbook is about. I found us a very nice one: the Montgomery bus boycott. So we not only have genuine cause and effect, we get to repeat and reinforce the lesson about racial equality and nonviolent collective action. Debbie was quite pleased when I brought the rewrite to her.
Then I got a "what's keeping this article?" email from my freelance copyediting client at ACM [2]. I explained why I'd asked her for a link to ACM's policy, and that I was now waiting on the author, and her return email assured me that next week would be okay, that they can if necessary hold the article until the following issue, and that she is "absolutely thrilled" that I found the problem and queried it.
I also fixed the answers to a "put these events in order" exercise: the text was clear, but the answers as written confused it badly. (We supply "annotations", containing correct answers or hints to them, for the teacher edition--sometimes it will be something like "Answers will vary, but should refer to X/show an understanding of Y": you can't know what the students will write in answer to something like "describe a tradition in your family.")
And, in a minor but pleasing moment, in verifying something about an exercise this afternoon, I noticed that a map had been mislabeled, with both Michigan and Minnesota identified as "MI" (which is the US postal abbrev. for Michigan; Minnesota is MN).
[1] Confusing sequence with cause-and-effect: it's the illogic of assuming that calling your sister caused it to rain because the rain started after you picked up the phone.
[2] My ex-employer. I also do some freelance proofreading for them, for a different publication and editor.
Then I got a "what's keeping this article?" email from my freelance copyediting client at ACM [2]. I explained why I'd asked her for a link to ACM's policy, and that I was now waiting on the author, and her return email assured me that next week would be okay, that they can if necessary hold the article until the following issue, and that she is "absolutely thrilled" that I found the problem and queried it.
I also fixed the answers to a "put these events in order" exercise: the text was clear, but the answers as written confused it badly. (We supply "annotations", containing correct answers or hints to them, for the teacher edition--sometimes it will be something like "Answers will vary, but should refer to X/show an understanding of Y": you can't know what the students will write in answer to something like "describe a tradition in your family.")
And, in a minor but pleasing moment, in verifying something about an exercise this afternoon, I noticed that a map had been mislabeled, with both Michigan and Minnesota identified as "MI" (which is the US postal abbrev. for Michigan; Minnesota is MN).
[1] Confusing sequence with cause-and-effect: it's the illogic of assuming that calling your sister caused it to rain because the rain started after you picked up the phone.
[2] My ex-employer. I also do some freelance proofreading for them, for a different publication and editor.