I writes good Engleesh, yes?

Over the last month or so, I have been helping Gabi with his BIG PAPER of which I am an author. Being the cruel, teach-a-man-to-fish kinda person that I am, I made him write everything and then I came along with the Blue Pen of Doom.

But then the paper got sent to different authors and colleagues for proof reading and funny things started happening.

In one draft, suddenly every time the word "gold" came up, it was capitalized. I can see how the rules for capitals would be confusing if you are used to having only have one case. (James claims, "Hebrew is all capitals; it's all yelling.")

And then someone else got a terrible disease called comma-itis. My guess is that dependent and independent clauses are more difficult to find for Hebrew speakers since Hebrew has sentences without verbs. No kidding. It seems unnatural.
It odd. It funny. I amused. (See what I mean?)

And then after the paper went to a native Russian speaker, a bunch of "the"s went missing.

The Boss gets ten points for either having a spectacular vocabulary or using a thesaurus for correctly inserting the word "concomitantly" which, I admit, I had to look up myself. James of course knew what it meant and said "did he mean 'contemporaneously'?" Show off.

But not to worry, I ate some humble pie too. One colleague commented on a part that I had written and said that it sounded like Hebrew translated into English. Ouch. I guess just because I can speak English doesn't mean my writing is any good. However that doesn't stop me from getting daily random phone calls with questions like "Is it 'I shoot down the spectrometer' or 'I shot down the spectrometer'?" or "What is 'Yikes'?"

But the real insult to my writing skills came a couple of months ago. Back in December, I had written some user instructions for the TEM as a goodwill gesture to the nanocentre and as a useful tool for my colleagues, and they were soon handing out my hard work out to every new user of the instrument. A couple of months ago, I was told that all distributed documents in this particular institution get sent out for proofreading to an external contractor. So yes my friends, my writing got sent out for proof reading of my English to INDIA.