I have always been obsessed with words, but it wasn’t until I arrived on American shores (well, plains really and ten hours from the sea) that I finally buckled down and learned U.S. grammar. I am not sure if it is all that different from English rules of grammar, but the rules certainly looked different to what I learned growing up in England but this may have been that I wasn’t the most attentive student in the world. (Sorry, Mum and Dad!)
Teaching freshman English to young American college students during graduate school was when I worked out that to teach grammar, you actually had to know the rules and so I learnt them. And then, I was introduced to the initial torture of learning the Modern Language Association (MLA) style book, which, when I first heard it in class, thought was being called “Emma Lay” and wondered who that was. (Thankfully, I kept my mouth shut during that class and found out later.)
And then I moved into the world of public relations and media and met with the Chicago Style Book – all different stuff! OK. Buckled down and learned that and somehow kept the two different writing styles straight in my head. That worked for a long time until I made an unexpected (but really good) move into technical writing for the world of engineering.
Holy cow. Yet another set of style guide rules to learn. And so now, I actually have four sets of style guide books floating around my head and am starting to get them mixed up with each other occasionally: the UK writing/spelling, the Emma Lay (:-)) style, the Chicago Style and now the engineering one that sort of evolves from one writer to another, depending on which area they are researching.
After having a confusing style day the other week, it’s clear that I have to pretty much forget all the other styles except this engineering one and so that’s my goal for this summer.
I will become a knowledge expert on this engineering style thingy. (That’s technical writing for ya.)
So I happened to be reading about copyediting and all that jazz, and came across this truly excellent article about the profession of copyediting (which is some of what I do)… These words are so very true and obviously written from experience… Take a looksie (article by Lori Franklin and taken from The Awl July 21 2010).
Aah. I understand your pain, sistah.
(And yes – there may an error in this post… Life is like that sometimes.)
Just One More Page... 
The cartoon reminds me of the menu board at my mother’s care home which always advertised ‘Artic Roll’. I used to sneak in a marker pen with me every time I visited and put in the missing ‘c’ but whoever wrote up the menu never took the hint.