A note about words I personally hate so stop using them, alright??

[Samantha]

218. When I trained, we had Sabin as our authority

He was generally accepted as the expert in these matters. With all of the changes we have seen as a result of the onslaught of so many software packages for word processing, suddenly we had an overabundance of "experts." As many of the classic rules continued to be broken, I always wondered who made this rule and what authority gave him or her the right to do so.

The rule about the two dashes sprang from the fact that typewriters did not have dashes, just hyphens. So to achieve a dash, type two hyphens. Leave a space before and after for ease of reading. So I always do that and when someone corrects it, I ignore the change. Part of the pleasure of reading text springs from the presentation.

You agree--don't you? You agree -- don't you?

The two spaces at the end of a final period were also for ease of reading -- to separate the end of one sentence from the beginning of the next.

I worked in the legal community for decades in various capacities but after I left I did transcripts as well for different counties in this area. I loved it but it was very hard work meeting some of those rush deadlines during lengthy trials. The uniformity in punctuation was necessary since often those really long transcripts -- hundreds of pages -- had to be split up among 3 or 4 people working as a team. It gave the document as a whole the look of having been done by one person.

I once got into a dispute with the person I worked for who headed the agency. She changed some words from what I had presented to force the sentence to make sense. She improvised on what was actually said. I refused to sign it because she totally changed the meaning of what the witness uttered to something grammatically pleasing.

Sam