One of the neat things about Web pages is the ease with which they can be revised. With traditional writing, once something’s printed, you’re pretty much stuck with it, errors and all. Unless you’re first name is Walt, your last name is Whitman, and you want to spend the rest of your career making changes to Leaves of Grass. But with Web pages, you can go back and say, “Hmm, I’ve been drawing MacKiernan with red hair ever since Episode 24, but I said here in Episode 2 that his mustache was black. Oops!” or, “Gee, I really ought to move the horizontal stabilizers on the graphic for Episode 16 up to the midline of the ship where they belong.”
This is way cool.
A responsible author would use this capability with restraint, aware of its potential for misuse. But restraint has never been one of my virtues, and as we all know, the word ‘misuse’ is but another a synonym for ‘temptation’. So I’ve gone through the Flying Cloud every few weeks to make sure that things like hair color, service ranks, and dates (!!!) were consistent. Along the way, I’ve tried to clean up some of the more unfortunate bits of prose. Among these was pretty much all of Episode 4. Which has just received major changes. If considered leaving an old copy up so people could compare them… but… such is not the way of a signalman in the Royal Navy Air Service!
R U interested in grammar errors at all?
I believe that the second sentence in this quote needs one of those curley cue things commonly called in English a ‘question mark’.
>>”Good man! Where is it and how do we set the thing up.”
http://airships.paulgazis.com/003/FlyingCloud003.htm
Feel free to delete this comment when fixed.
I am enjoying the flying cloud.
Hi Von, thanks for spotting the error! It has been fixed and you have now entered the Royal Naval Airship Service Hall of Fame: the Few, the Proud, the People Who Catch Grammatical Mistakes! I do my best to proof-read every episode, but… let’s just say that I could probably not look forward to a successful and rewarding career as a copy-editor
I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the Saga so far, punctuation errors, Green Marines, and all…
Oooh. Hall of Fame stuff eh? And if I catch a second?
>>Clauses C and D with final pay grade and bonuses to be determined according to Clause G welcome aboard.”
I could be wrong, and I am no grammarian, but I would have thought that normal English usage would require a period after ‘Clause G’ and a capital letter for ‘Welcome aboard.’
This appears twice in the same way. I assume you copy/pasted.
Now, it could be you meant this to look as if it was rushed speech, so it might be intentional. I dunno.
You are quite right, Von, it was indeed a rushed speech. Captain Everett is spouting out a long and tedious formal sentence without any of the gaps or pauses that represent clauses and punctuation was developed to represent because the sentence is very long and formal with no real information content whatsoever as well as an announcement he has made so many times that he could recite at great length and by heart for a period of time limited only by his lung capacity which… whew… even typing that was tough! And he’s only a Captain. Imagine what a trained signalman like Jenkins could do!
I used this stunt one or two other places. As you will discover when you reach… but that would be telling…
Yes. I thought that that, was what you were doing. I have seen that before. In other books.
Have you ever read ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’??