It means you’re in the company of a fellow human 😉
If you find an error on my site, feel free to let me know about it. I don’t bite, and I’m always happy to chat with other humans. Just keep in mind what I think is an error and what you think is an error may be different things.
For example, I am super keen on using the British style when it comes to the use of punctuation and quotation marks. The American way just doesn’t make sense to me sometimes.
Like when I read something like this: Did you say “I saw him at the bar?” I’m like, NO. I didn’t say something with an inflection in my voice at all! I didn’t ask, “I saw him at the bar?“. I said “I saw him at the bar.“
Punctuation can change the entire meaning of a sentence if you’re not careful. I take it on a case-by-case basis. If it looks weird to me inside the quotation marks, I move it to the outside.
In both American and British English, the rule is to put it on the outside. You’re asking if someone made a statement.
I agree — I think very few people actually know that part of the rules… because people call me out for the way I use quotations + punctuation ALL the time 😉
You’ve probably already heard this, but in the interest of accuracy I feel the need to point out one obvious error on your home page.
— Extensive practice: students proofread more than 3,100 pages of practice transcripts as part of the curriculum. Practice jobs vary greatly in intensity, amount of errors, and topic. Topics include medical, insurance, workers’ comp, technical, expert, and general litigation.
I believe it should read “number of errors” rather than “amount of errors.”
Do I qualify to learn to be a proofreader? LOL
You could — just know that if you were proofreading and found that in a spoken-word transcript, you wouldn’t be able to fix it … if you did, that’d be a bad thing 🙂
I did find the use of “prefer…to” to be confusing in the paragraph below. Did you intend to use “refer”?
The agency I was employed with in ’09-’11 and the agency I contract with now (one of the largest agencies in the country with offices nationwide — US Legal Support) did not and never will prefer their reporters to use proofreaders who make changes directly to the document.
Prefer is the correct word in this sentence. I can see where there could be some confusion with the two words! 😉