As an undergraduate, I worked for a campus magazine, and became the proofreader because I was the only person there with even a vague understanding of how punctuation worked. I learned rapidly that most college students do not have any idea whether the comma goes before or after the word "and" joining two clauses. I also learned that many people do not think you have to run photo captions past the proofreader. These people must die.
(This also gave me the strange honor of having copyedited some of Patton Oswalt's early work.)
The copy in the school newspaper and the yearbook was even more illiterate than that. One day, when I was doing some research in the library, I stumbled across a shelf of old yearbooks from the 1930s and 1940s, and was shocked at how well-written they all were. I suppose it's not necessarily a simple Kids Are Going To Hell story: I knew perfectly well that most of my friends could compose a coherent English sentence. It's just that none of them were in the cliques that produced the campus publications, except for me.
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dancing_serpent
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-12 09:41 pm (UTC)(This also gave me the strange honor of having copyedited some of Patton Oswalt's early work.)
The copy in the school newspaper and the yearbook was even more illiterate than that. One day, when I was doing some research in the library, I stumbled across a shelf of old yearbooks from the 1930s and 1940s, and was shocked at how well-written they all were. I suppose it's not necessarily a simple Kids Are Going To Hell story: I knew perfectly well that most of my friends could compose a coherent English sentence. It's just that none of them were in the cliques that produced the campus publications, except for me.