Tuesday, September 11, 2007

It hurts, it hurts!

What do you do, when someone asks you to do something that you KNOW is wrong?

You KNOW it's wrong, and it pains you to do it, but you feel you can't speak up or say anything about it?

Now, before you start thinking that someone has asked me to kill someone else for them, it is nothing like that. At all.

I am a coordinator. I plan events and do almost everything in between for an event. One of those things is building a syllabus or program guide for an event / conference. Most of the events i organize are conferences for the healthcare industry.

When i build a program guide or syllabus, i take the info someone gives me which usually comes in the form of a word document and i flash it up, take out extra spaces, make corrections etc. etc.

With this syllabus i'm currently working on, it had a lot of small errors like capitalizing Every Word In A Title Including The 'Thes' And 'Ands' And 'As' And 'Ins' etc. etc.

I corrected them so that only the appropriate words in the titles were capitalized.

I sent it back for review, and she sent it back to me with a ton of track changes and she changed back ALL of the words i had de-capitalized.

It looks stupid, and unprofessional and it pains me to go back and make every insignificant word start with a capital.

Should i say something or let it go? This isn't my conference, and techincally i just carry out their wishes and make happen what they want, and if they want their titles to be capitalized and incorrect, i guess i should let it be, right?

This person is older, and supposedly has done this before, but she's a nurse and so that tells me that she hasn't had to do a lot of writing and editing etc.

Thoughts?

p.s. i KNOW i'm horrible about things like that when i write here, but when i'm making something that goes to print, it's different....k?

4 comments:

Sarah said...

My husband being a graphic desinger,and having been a typographer would totally agree, and understand where you're coming from. After all, isn't your job to make those people look good, and help them when they look ignorant? I am horrible with grammar and spelling, so I have no room to say anything. That being said...I think as someone that edits things and makes things look their best for a living you are completely justified in saying something. You could say something like "Thanks for your changes, but I did have a question for you. do you mean to have the And's, As's, The's etc, capitalized? The reason I'm asking is because that's not really correct, but if there's a reason that you want those to remain capitalized, then I won't change them" or something along those lines. I probably wouldn't notice so much, but someone will notice, so for her benefit (and your sanity)you should put your foot down and say something. :-)

b*babbler said...

Ooh.. this would definitely drive me bananas. Crazy, in fact, absolutely crazy. But I'm a bit nutty like that.

As for solutions, I think Sarah G has it covered.

Unknown said...

Hmm, I understand as I edit things quite a bit, and I am sometimes met with resistance. We have a fall back. We always say it's our house style and unless they are really uncomfortable with the change, we prefer to keep things consistent. But if you don't think that'll work, you could simply write back and explain the change to them and ask if they'd still like to stet the change. If they say yes, be positive! Sure! We'll keep it your way! No problem! If they don't have a strong preference, then problem solved.

Or feign ignorance, and say "Track changes is such a funny function. Did you mean to re-captialize certain words in titles, as that's not what I'm used to, so I wanted to make sure I was reading the change correctly."

Anonymous said...

I am love caps. LOL. I tend to do it to my blog titles (although I am trying to be better).

I guess that if this is the way she wants it, all you can do is go with it.