RE: Poll: Is technical writing a sellout or fallback career?

["Guy K. Haas" <guy -at- hiskeyboard -dot- com>]

Well, Kevin, it's like this...

Time was when our Silicon Valley area clerks did ask

   "Do you want paper, or plastic?"

but more and more of late, I'm hearing no comma.

If I were to use capitalization to represent rising intonation, I'd render
the appropriate query as

   "Do you want PAper, or PLAStic?"

    di di  di   DAH di di DAH di   (think Morse code)

but what keeps coming to my ears of late is more like

   "Do you want paper-or-PLASTIC?"

    di di  di   di di  di DAH DAH

We use punctuation to help us represent several dimensions of spoken
Enlish that have no alphabetic orthography: pitch, pitch-change, stress,
pauses, ...

I wonder whether the clerks who don't "use the comma" can actually
carry a tune.  They do not use the normal music of the spoken language.

--Guy
   yadda yadda yadda



On Thu, August 7, 2008 11:44 am, McLauchlan, Kevin wrote:
> Guy K. Haas continued the spiral into the ambiguously absurd, or
> possibly the absurdly ambiguous...
>> Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2008 14:26
>> To: Combs, Richard
>> Cc: Techwr-l
>> Subject: RE: Poll: Is technical writing a sellout or fallback career?
>>
>> Q: "Do you want paper or plastic?"
>>
>> A: "Yes"
>
>
> Um, I haven't bothered to even visit the site, let alone take the silly
> poll. However, I was going to respond to this thread that
> English-speaking techwriters know enough to phrase their material
> correctly, make proper use of punctuation to impart the desired meaning,
> etc.
>
> However, perhaps that was a premature thought.
>
> When the cashier at my local supermarket asks the paper-or-plastic
> question, I understand exactly what is being asked.......... but what I
> hear would be transcribed as:
> "Do you want paper, or plastic?"
>
> Notice that little comma-thingie.
>
> Makes all the difference, doesn't it?
> So, if at least some list-members aren't making the comma distinction,
> then maybe the pollster wrote his question intending it to be read as
> though there was a comma, but either forgot or ... egad... didn't
> realize.
>  - Kevin


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