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The old fashioned way...
I was, if anything, an "early adopeter" of the idea of on-screen editing.
Understand, it was a change for me, as all my previous training (writing papers, letters for publication, articles for the college paper) had ingrained the use of typewriter, paper, and red pencil for any written endeavors. Nonetheless, there were factors driving me away from paper-based editing.
For one thing, back when my translation got "computerized" (ca. 1981), my daisy-wheel printer was a cheap but reliable machine that output all of ten characters per second. If one assumes the traditional 6 characters per word (5 letters and a space), then a 1000-word translation would take 600 seconds (or 10 minutes) to print out. A 6000-word job would take an hour, and so on.
And since one submitted printed output as the final product in those days, that meant printing the job again, after editing it to perfection. This rapidly shortened the service life of the proprietary (and not inexpensive) film ribbon cartridge used by my printer, so between savings of time and money... well, you get the picture.
There was another factor egging me on to edit on-screen, however: impatience. I'd start to edit something on paper and then, before you knew it, I'd lost control of the process because I could "see" what needed to be done to the document. So typically, I'd stop editing somewhere around page four and sit down at the keyboard.
So now, I edit on paper only when I have to compare a lot of details in text (equations come to mind, here). The last part of 60K was such a document, and I am actually amazed that I was able to curb my usual impatience.
In any event, despite my initial plan to do it in chunks (to keep the mind fresh), I sat down around 9:15 this morning and went pretty much straight through (to get it over with). I finished the paper edit a few minutes ago, almost exactly 5 hours later. Now I need to go through the 90+ pages and incorporate the edits, most of which are typos the spell check didn't find along with a handful of "style" changes to make things sound better. The items that will take probably the most time are the three small omissions I found (probably a total of 60-70 words in a 20,000 word document), and editing two figures, in which I entered incorrect subscripts for a transistor current.
Then I absolutely need to get cracking on the Thursday job.
But I sure would like to go out and do something with Galina for an hour or two, also, so we'll see what develops.
Cheers...
Understand, it was a change for me, as all my previous training (writing papers, letters for publication, articles for the college paper) had ingrained the use of typewriter, paper, and red pencil for any written endeavors. Nonetheless, there were factors driving me away from paper-based editing.
For one thing, back when my translation got "computerized" (ca. 1981), my daisy-wheel printer was a cheap but reliable machine that output all of ten characters per second. If one assumes the traditional 6 characters per word (5 letters and a space), then a 1000-word translation would take 600 seconds (or 10 minutes) to print out. A 6000-word job would take an hour, and so on.
And since one submitted printed output as the final product in those days, that meant printing the job again, after editing it to perfection. This rapidly shortened the service life of the proprietary (and not inexpensive) film ribbon cartridge used by my printer, so between savings of time and money... well, you get the picture.
There was another factor egging me on to edit on-screen, however: impatience. I'd start to edit something on paper and then, before you knew it, I'd lost control of the process because I could "see" what needed to be done to the document. So typically, I'd stop editing somewhere around page four and sit down at the keyboard.
So now, I edit on paper only when I have to compare a lot of details in text (equations come to mind, here). The last part of 60K was such a document, and I am actually amazed that I was able to curb my usual impatience.
In any event, despite my initial plan to do it in chunks (to keep the mind fresh), I sat down around 9:15 this morning and went pretty much straight through (to get it over with). I finished the paper edit a few minutes ago, almost exactly 5 hours later. Now I need to go through the 90+ pages and incorporate the edits, most of which are typos the spell check didn't find along with a handful of "style" changes to make things sound better. The items that will take probably the most time are the three small omissions I found (probably a total of 60-70 words in a 20,000 word document), and editing two figures, in which I entered incorrect subscripts for a transistor current.
Then I absolutely need to get cracking on the Thursday job.
But I sure would like to go out and do something with Galina for an hour or two, also, so we'll see what develops.
Cheers...