Been blindingly sick, but only off-and-on, for a few weeks, which explains why I have posted so very little here. But it has not been a slow few weeks, at all: I am finished with the albatross. No, Ringo and Paul, I did not declare, “I am the albatross” — I am no more albatross than I am walrus — I declared that I am finished with the albatross. The albatross being a project I should never have talked anyone else into, but I did, and thank heaven it’s over, and no, it was not worth it. In any sense. …
Tag: teaching in Korea
I’m Sorry, and Who Are You Again?
Apologies for any typos you see: I’m still adjusting to the itty bitty keyboard on my Asus Eee and, well, you know… Someone I know recently told me how she has learned to take pleasure in refusing requests that make no sense. There will always be some people who will ask you to do something — often some work for them often unpaid. It’s all in how they ask, though. Sometimes I’m willing to do a favour for a friend, sometimes I’m glad to pitch in on a project for a good cause. When someone who is neither a friend …
Rewrite?
When the first written comment on your essay reads, “This borders on completely unreadable,” and the professor stops writing editorial marks a few pages in after complaining of the paper’s incomprehensibility having given him a headache, then you should not be surprised — let alone shocked — when he expects you to redraft the thing completely when you resubmit it for as a final draft.
False Alarm
My last post involved muttering grumbles about proofreading. Well, good news and bad news: the bad news is that it wasn’t even for a project I’m connected to — it was for something else altogether, and nobody made that clear. It was just, “We need you to do X, we’ll renumerate as Y, the [ridiculous] deadline is Z.” Or at least, that was what I gathered from the phone call (in Korean) and the follow-up email (in English). I guess someone forgot to actually ask me if I had time/was willing to take on an extra proofreading gig. The good …
Gecko Tape? Oil-Defecating Bacteria? Spider Silk Construction Materials?
These are the kinds of things that end up in 8th grade conversational English textbooks when you let an SF writer do some of the content. (The spider silk was actually suggested to me: I just riffed on the theme of biotech.) It also happens to say a lot that anyone besides an SF writer could look at content like that for such a textbook and say, “Yeah, sure, why not?” Heck of a world we’re in, folks! But you know, biotech is at least more interesting than, “This is my sister. She is five years old.” Or some of …