Posts about “Writing Humour”
Nothing like a slip-up in bullet list formatting to completely change meaning. Check out this hilarious example from failblog.org:
Now that’s a major copy-editing FAIL.
I’ve just finished reading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a wonderfully humourous book full of advice on how to write and how to overcome those challenges all writers face. Here’s an excerpt I particularly like:
“But how?” my students ask. “How do you actually do it?”
You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively.
Every profession needs a theme song, right? Here’s one I found about technical writing, unashamedly cannibalized from the Beatles song “Paperback Writer.”
This little ditty isn’t exactly inspiring with lyrics like these: “So I spend my day inside a lonely pod, but I need a job, so I gotta be a technical writer.” But hey, it’s worth a laugh anyway.
Apple’s new MacBook Air is purportedly the world’s thinnest (and sexiest) laptop, but is a bit shallow when it comes to hardware. The lack of CD-Rom drive or landline internet access for example, may discourage first-time laptop buyers. But if you need some compelling reasons to shell out for a laptop you can fit into a manilla envelope, perhaps these philanthropic possibilities will persuade you:
Source: Joyoftech.com
This is as geeky as it gets folks. The EAC meeting last night featured a talk entitled “Crouching comma, hidden hyphen” by Ramona Montagnes, one of the authors of the Canadian Writer’s Handbook and director of the UBC Writing Centre. This list was on one of her handouts.
The top 16 things likely to be overheard if you had Klingon technical writers working on your documentation team:
Klingons do not sit in meetings, we take what we want and kill anyone who opposes us!
A new miracle drug has hit the scene - and it just might save your life… It’s called Havidol, check out their website right now and see if Havidol is for you!
I’ve heard tales of proofreaders being unappreciated and underpaid, but this takes the cake! Check out this news article on a proofreader who died at work and was only discovered five days later by the janitor.
Okay, okay, this story seems too bizarre to be true, and so it is. This article was later determined to be a fake. I mean think about it - even if the office had it’s air conditioning turned up to the max (unlikely on a cold October day in New York), the corpse would have started emitting an offense odour after three days.