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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (49446)	6/8/2004 8:57:51 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793991

OT: What a WONDERFUL site! Thank you so much for recommending it. I will join forthwith!

To: carranza2 who wrote (49446)	6/8/2004 10:31:22 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793991

"That" and "which" throw me, I admit. I have several guides to grammar and if it matters to me for professional reasons, I'll pull them out, or else let my mom proofread, because she was a professional proofreader for many years, and it still matters to her. A lot of the time I suspect I am making an error but don't feel like taking the time to make sure. But even worse, sometimes I know I am breaking rules but don't care. In other words, I am a bad, bad rule-breaking rabbit. Am I lax? Probably. My older son, who is studying economics for fun this summer, calls it "maximizing utility." When it comes to legal briefs, I am more anal than anybody I know. But I do recall reading a story -- true story -- written by a young lawyer who had majored in psychology before going to law school, about "falling rats." When you teach rats to run mazes, sometimes they get screwed up, and connect random thrashing around with getting the reward. So, to get the reward, they thrash around, flopping here and there until by accident they hit the lever, and they keep doing that because it works. He used this as an analogy to a lawyer he worked with/for at a very large firm, which had hot-and-cold-running paralegals on tap all hours of the night, and unlimited expense accounts for couriers and overnight shipping and the like. At one point, while working on a brief that absolutely, positively, had to be on a jet plane at midnight, as the lawyer he was talking about was giving the brief the final check, he decided to change one hyphen to a double hyphen. Which required retyping the page, rerunning the copies, rebinding the briefs, while the courier waited, clock ticking, and the far off jet prepared to take off, with or without the brief. Yes, it's true that in some places, a double hyphen is proper where a single hyphen is not - to use the exact, precise term that I know as a former printer while most proofreaders don't, the difference between an em dash and an en dash. Is it worth losing an appeal because the brief was late? No. P.S. The historical difference between an em dash and an en dash is aesthetic. I submit to you that people who turn aesthetic preferences into hard-and-fast rules don't really understand what they are doing, or why. They're servants to a cause they don't understand. The people who make the rules are the masters. Or so I tell myself. ;^) P.P.S. These days, Word automatically converts double hyphens to em dashes.