At Least One Native is Restless

Yesterday at work, I received an email requesting my help proof-reading some instructions.  As I've mentioned before, this isn't an unusual request, so I thought little of it when I opened the attached document.  What I found was different from what I usually work on.  For one, the document was written by someone in my office who is, presumably, a native English-speaker.  For two, the document was much longer than those that I normally help out with: nearly thirty pages as opposed to three to five.  Still, this is a standard part of my job, so I dove right in.

The documents that I normally proof have been reviewed at least once already.  I usually just catch some awkward phrasing that slipped through or fix punctuation errors.  This time, it was pretty clear that whoever worked on the document before me hadn't even read through it once.  There were three sentences that just ended in the middle (something like "To set the temperature access the. To set the time ...").  Three!  One or even two would be surprising enough but three makes it seem like he was trying to slip in mistakes.  Remember how it was really long?  Well that wasn't that big a deal because the last half of it wasn't written: it was just a bunch of headings and sub-headings, but no body text.

I tried really hard to be as polite as possible with the questions I asked ("This sentence appears to end in the middle. Was that intentional?"), but I had to correct so many errors and ask a lot of clarifying questions that I wonder if the original author will be offended.  If he takes offence, I'll be honest and point out that I had to ask so many questions because the instructions he wrote were so unclear.  Maybe it'll be fine and he'll recognize that I'm just doing my job.

Who would have guessed that proofing a (presumed) native English-speaker's work would be so much more annoying than a non-native one's?  Maybe the stuff from Danish writers is more fun because I can look for patterns to learn about some of the difference between the languages.  Whatever the reason for the difference in enjoyment, I was very pleased to discover that the page count was inflated.