Our first love and last love is … Self-love. -Fortune Cookie

I&#039m trying to reconcile my job, my hobbies, and my major. My current projects here at the tutoring center are to edit a book (Yes, an entire book that will be used by students here this fall.) and a manual (Which will be used by advisors all over campus this fall.). So I&#039m doing a ton of editing; commas all over the place, some strange wording, a few mis-used colons and even a couple misspelled words. Editing. Spelling. Grammar. This is the work of a grammarian, not a linguist! I&#039m a linguistics student which makes my task that much more difficult. A number of linguists subscribe to the notion that so long as the point gets across, who cares if there&#039s no comma or if it&#039s a run-on sentence? Beyond being a linguist, I&#039m also a poet/writer. I play with words and toy with their meaning. Word choice is crucial when one writes poetry because the poem can be lauded or just loaded depending upon the slight difference in meaning of even just one word. Going through these documents, I&#039m being pulled in three different directions: trying to fix punctuation, weigh word choice, and then add to it the relevance or irrelevance of all of these combined. Believe me, editing would be so much easier if I had just decided to be a grammarian and nothing else. Then again, I think my life would be a hell of a lot more boring &#039cause I&#039m not a big fan of grammar, and my life&#039s passions lie in poetry and linguistics. So I&#039m suffering. At least now I&#039m not suffering entirely because of sinuses (They&#039re still aggravating, but it&#039s less so now.) or lack of sleep. Oh well, back to the task.

Posted: June 3, 2004 at half past two in the afternoon.