Is there something that drives you crazy about the way your colleagues do their jobs? I don't mean they chew gum all day and park in your space. I mean, if you could retrain them, what would you want to beat into their heads?

In the alternative, what are your pet writing peeves?

-- Anonymous, December 03, 1999

Answers

my coworkers are okay, but working in a student computing help center isn't too hard.

writing (and speaking, for that matter) pet peeves are another thing entirely. for one, use who and whom correctly. second, never end your sentences with prepositions. (the minnesotan colloquialism "want to come with?" sets off ALL my alarms.) third, if you can't define it, don't use it in a sentence.

and four, sentence is NOT spelled s-e-n-t-A-n-c-e. (i'm anal retentive about people who can't spell, because sometimes you could just look at the words and tell they're wrong wrong wrong! and use a spell checker, too!)

-- Anonymous, December 03, 1999

Beth, those are wonderful examples! I'm a technical writer for a computer company. I get very technical specification documents from engineers and incorporate the material into books. Lots of these are badly written because the engineers are, after all, engineers. A lot of them are not native English speakers. Some of them are actually quite well written.

That's fine. Everybody here has a good attitude and it's widely acknowledged that their job is to write programs and mine is to write documentation and we each help each other out. Apparently at some places the engineers have no respect for the writers.

But that's not what you asked.

What gets to me is when I then go to update a book, one written by someone here before me, and I find style problems. The one I hate the most is probably use of the passive voice. It just sounds so weasely. Don't say "It is not recommended that you delete your entire database", say "Acme strongly recommends that you do not..." We make this product, we wrote the software, we should tell people how the hell to use it.

In computer writing, passive voice can confuse things. Better to say "The compiler detected a syntax error" than "A syntax error was detected." What the heck does that mean?

Your example of "asserts", I think it was, sounded like the legal language version of this. Yucko.

Luckily, the style guide and our editors agree with me on this, and so do my colleagues. We all have some minor style disagreements, but that's okay. We debate a lot about terminology, if we all have to refer to the same thing - is that thing a pop up window, a popup, a pop up box, or what? Let's discuss! This can become very tedious. Some time back we started creating online help products and there were some really awful discussions about what size font, what background color, italics vs underlining, etc etc. I really didn't care - just decide on a style sheet and let me know. Unfortunately, others cared a lot.

In general, my largest writing peeve is the old its / it's thing.

-- Anonymous, December 03, 1999

I've become more tolerant of its/it's and your/you're, for one simple reason: after a lifetime of perfection, I started making those mistakes myself after a few years online. I'd never done that before in my very wordy life. So I'll correct it if I'm editing or proofreading, but I try to not to sweat it otherwise. (Exception: there's a guy on a forum I read who consistently screws up there/they're/their. I don't mean he makes a mistake sometimes, I mean he has them all mixed up and he uses his mixed-up version all the time. That drives me nuts.)

Passive voice is discouraged in legal writing, too. (Look! I just used it!) But there are exceptions that they don't tell you about in law school: sometimes you don't want to say, "Bob stabbed the victim." You want to say, "The victim was stabbed." Assuming, of course, you're representing Bob.

At my law school, the people in charge of the writing program were completely obsessed with passive voice. As a result, I use it quite a lot, just because I'm like that. But it's a bad habit unless you're using it deliberately.

-- Anonymous, December 03, 1999

I'm a student teacher right now, and one of my biggest complaints about my classmates is how damn whiney they are.

"I don't think it's faiiiiiir that we get graded on these papers. It isn't faiiiiiiir to be graded on our thoughts."

"I don't see why we have to learn how to write lesson plans. It's so haaaaaard. It isn't faiiiiiiir."

Bleah.

-- Anonymous, December 03, 1999

I have so many legal writing peeves that I don't know where to begin. I think Beth's examples are really funny, and much better than I could dash off. They all apply to my everyday work, except that we civil attorneys don't often get a chance to use foul language.

What civil lawyers do is fight over the exchange of documents in pretrial discovery. Judges hate it. Most courts have both criminal and civil dockets, and it's hard for a judge to spend all morning hearing argument on whether the plaintiff should have a peek at the defendant's tax records, when the judge also has to decide that day how many years to take from the life of some hapless idiot who got caught getting off a flight with ten grams of coke.

But we civil lawyers have no perspective on this. Documents take up 95% of my time - maybe 99%. All I do is write to judges asking for other people's documents, or asking her or him not to make me produce my client's documents.

I often imagine making a Paul Newman stand at one of these oral arguments on a discovery dispute: "Your Honor . . . if these walls . . . which have seen so much justice done . . . if these walls could speak, your Honor . . . They would cry out to you . . . Make them, oh Lord, make them . . . Produce. The. Documents."

-- Anonymous, December 03, 1999

Oh, you just had to go and get me started, didn't you? Bad writing is my pet peeve to top all pet peeves (of which I have many, I'm sure!). As a former writing major turned computer programmer, I've been the de facto document editor for many of my employers. I have yet to be amazed at the eloquence of writing I've seen, and I've often been horrified.

Proposals are the worst - the corporate version of the resume, I just can't understand a "good enough" approach. The only thing that should be "good enough" is perfection. Misspellings and blatantly WRONG grammar are inexcusable in a current word processor. The software will check and correct these things for you!

Like you, Beth, I've somewhat reconciled myself to the fact that many people can't remember that it's and its aren't the same thing. I think my biggest irritant now is commas. Specifically, their overuse. Commas, are not, meant to, be inserted, whenever you pause, to think. I think too few Americans graduated high school without the ability to diagram a basic sentence and understand the difference between dependent and independent clauses.

Then again, maybe I'm just an overly picky perfectionistic bitch. Tha

-- Anonymous, December 03, 1999

Ooohhh, you don't want to get me started on my pet peeves at work. It's a library for Ph.D. students and other grads. You'd think they'd have learned a small amount of common sense by now, would you not? At the moment I'm thoroughly annoyed at all the people who argue and rant and bluster and whine at me over a dollar overdue fine. I especially hate the ones who try to convince me that they have never heard of a library charging overdue fines. But not quite as much as I hate the ones who tell me they shouldn't have to pay fines because they were using the books for their dissertation, or who try to make me prove that other people wanted to use the books while they were overdue.

-- Anonymous, December 03, 1999

People who don't take proper care of their pets!!! If you're not going to care for it, don't bother to get one! Afterall it's not a requirement for life on this earth... It's a choice and if you choose to get a pet you had damn well better care for it properly!!!

And on that same note....people who want me to euthanise their pets for frivolous reasons: he pees on the floor, he chews the couch, my BF/GF doesn't like cats/dogs... GGGGGRRRRRRRR!!!

-- Anonymous, December 03, 1999

Badly written code.

I'm a web designer and I HATE coming in on a project that has already been through a couple of Alpha or Beta versions and the previous designer either:

a) Generated the code in a Microsoft product
b) Didn't put ANY comments in the code
c) Didn't indent or block any of the code
d) Used so many extraneous tags that you can't find the applicable content amidst the code.

On the other hand, this is what I get paid to deal with.

It's just SO annoying to have to pick up other people's messes all the time. I've got plenty of my own to deal with. Thankyewverymuch.

*grin*

-- Anonymous, December 03, 1999

Arrgh, as I re-read my earlier post, I realized that I committed one of my own least favorite blunders: disagreement between antecedent and pronoun. I wrote "judges," plural, in one sentence, and in the following sentence I referred back to "judges" as "her or him," when it should have been "them." People who do that should generally be gutted like fish and left on pikes outside the courthouseas a warning. Not me of course, but others.

-- Anonymous, December 03, 1999

I read law books for a living, in the process of indexing them. Half the time I can't understand a word I'm reading, especially if it's real estate or envirnmental law, but I manage to index it anyway.

I think lawyers write the way they do on purpose, so that very few people other than themselves can understand it. If they wrote in plain English, after all, fewer people would need to pay them to translate the gibberish.

I've never had any interest in being a lawyer, but somehow I've ended up working with lawyers for the last 15 years. Some of the other index editors where are work are also lawyers, and of course the legal editors are all lawyers, and many of the administraive types are lawyers as well. At least they don't practice law for a living though, which makes them a more mellow lot than the litigator types I used to work with, and I'm gratelful for that.

-- Anonymous, December 03, 1999

...working as a web producer, i can only complain about bad code...however, i think the "corporate lingo bingo" i get in emails is my latest peeve:

most hated:

• "let's take it offline"
• "we need to make the site more scratch n' sniff"
• "as a process moving forward..."
• "our project goals are to grab all of the low hanging fruit"
• "we want to be the amazon.com of the [insert company type here] world"

...aside from that i can't complain --- despite being educated i'm a horrendous speller [but at least i spell check religiously], continuously use passive voice, and have barely passable grammar techniques...

...at least [on occasion] i can write witty prose...

-- Anonymous, December 03, 1999

Print designers. I hate fucking print designers.

Now, if you're a print designer and you aren't of the mind that designing for the web is just like print then you're excluded. But all the other print designers? You all suck. You create more work for me by being premadonna "artists" who think that that just because you can make a photoshop file of it, you can code it. You never take take browser compatibility into consideration, and what's worse, YOU DON'T KNOW HTML. So fuck you. I can kick your little pantone butts any day, web OR print, so stop bitching at me because I revised your design in order to make it web compatible.

It sucked in the first place.

(disclaimer: I am having a bad, bad day. Usually I'm very fair minded but today I decided that I'm a better designer than anyone I've worked with in the last six months. It helps give my bitching validation.)

-- Anonymous, December 03, 1999

No job complaints, largely due to a lack of steady employment. My big english language complaint is usually perpetrated orally, but I have no doubt that it has been written many times. "I have a friend of mine..."

This one bothers me so much largely because it doesn't violate any specific rule. It pushes that 'Avoid Unnecessary Redundancy' guideline, though. And if anybody who said it though about it for just a fraction of a moment, they'd realize what a silly thing it is to say.

-- Anonymous, December 04, 1999

If I could retrain the people I work with???? Hmmm let me think ... I work as a engineer in a specialised area and I really, really, really hate it when somebody picks up a small bit of information and decides they know more then I do. Suddenly I'm being asked some ridiculous questions - honesly some of them are stupid - and when I answer them it goes over their heads. I don't tell them how to do their job! why can't they accept that of course I'll put in a system that works so BACK OFF. I've had a lot of it this week so I'm ratty - and paranoid about spelling and punctuation after reading the other entries.

-- Anonymous, December 04, 1999

Well, people who can't write are always a favourite irritant... my workplace has a number of those. Its/it's, plurals with apostrophes (arrgh!) and (my particular allergy) the incorrect use of the verbs "to lie" and "to lay" --- aahhh! I'm feeling a faint overall itch just thinking about it. I have a particular fondness for those who, after giving me something to "look over" (yes, I am the unofficial looker-over in my office), gaze plaintively at all the little red pencil marks and say, "But I ran it through the spell-checker!"

However, for full-out annoyance value, I think the winners would have to be those who have a very definite idea of how their piece should look, whether or not that idea adheres to the basic principles of design. (Yes, Brianna -- I am a print designer, and I resemble your accusation. Recommend a couple of good HTML primers to me, and I'll start working on it.)

Want to irritate me? Come into my office with a first draft I've done of your brochure, and say, "Well, those five paragraphs are important -- could you set them all caps? And maybe make these sentences italic, too. And what about some underlining for these important words?" "I want that line centred. Yes, just that line -- why do you ask?" "Couldn't you do something like... I dunno, put a different piece of clipart in for each and every point?" "I want it to look kinda fancier. Don't you think maybe if you used a few more fonts...?"

Sigh. And there I am, far too polite to jump up and down foaming and shouting, "If you want something ugly, get out of my bleeding office and do it yourself with Microsoft Word Art, you silly twit!" I get some relief for my feelings by listening to angsty alternative CDs with headphones on and the volume turned up loud, getting a pathetic kick out of David Usher repeating the word "motherfucker." Did I mention that everyone else in the office likes to turn on their speakerphones and pipe in the hold music... a direct feed from a station called, oddly enough, CHYM. "Today's hits and yesterday's favourites... music everyone in the office can agree on," except me. Of course, the inescapable fact that I'm a weirdo is my problem, not theirs.

-- Anonymous, December 04, 1999

Bad advertising. I'm an art director for an ad agency and what irritates me more than anything is seeing a bad commercial for a large corporation like Pepsi, Nike etc where the creatives involved obviously had millions of dollars to play with and still came up with crap. I just end up thinking, hey I have half the budget of that and my stuff is still better, why don't I get to use Seinfeld in my ads!!

-- Anonymous, December 04, 1999

Hey! I used to work on those bad commercials for Pepsi. But if you work in advertising in New York, you can probably understand why they're so bad. We had to pander to the Bottlers' Association. Lowest common denominator, ya know?

-- Anonymous, December 04, 1999

Oops, sorry. I should have known it would be because of the clients! Unfortunately I don't work in the States. But I would love to do a Pepsi ad in New York one day, green card permitting.

-- Anonymous, December 05, 1999