Thread:LordLykouleon/@comment-25085701-20181111222948/@comment-32059406-20181115121236

I think teaching other people is still really good -- having a technical writer who really knows their stuff is incredibly helpful! As Habitica's grown, I bet the number of people on the wiki has grown exponentially, so I think teaching is just as important as doing actual edits.

In computer engineering, there are so many acronyms and weird terms, and at my old job, my boss would throw them around like candy, and I'd always have to ask for clarification, and then clarification on the clarification... The place I work at now has less acronyms, but there are still times where someone will throw something out that doesn't make sense.

When I'm writing technical documents that other engineers will read, I keep undefined vocabulary at about a freshman/sophomore undergraduate level. If it's for anyone else, I write like I'm writing for my mother -- she's brilliant at English, but thanks to bad teachers and lax standards in the 1960's and 1970's, cannot do almost any math. I've learned how to explain advanced aspects of my work to her, so I use that to write documents that non-technical people might also read. There's no point to writing a document to 'sound smart' to an audience who doesn't know what you're talking about -- someone who really knows what they're talking about can break it down so any average person can understand at least the main idea, I think. Teaching in itself is an art, but nobody wants to spend tons of time searching for acronyms and word definitions when non-technical English vocabulary can do the same job.

Looking for typos sounds like a lot of fun! For some of them (like 'stake') you always kind of wonder how nobody caught it! What is "half a heart sandwich" even supposed to be, though?? Somehow, that sounds more ominous than whatever an "evil jungle printze" is...

Regarding typos in Chinese menus, those are amazing, and so is obviously Google translated text. I don't have them on me, but I took a bunch of pictures of 'unique' translations, so to speak, in China. I was laughing too hard to read the Chinese, but in English, one restaurant advertised a "F***ing Good Mojito" on their sign outside. I'm really curious what's in "Whatever", too. You'd think at some point someone would say something and they'd fix it, but maybe not.

Speaking of menu mistranslations, my roommate on the aforementioned Chinese trip (who also spoke Chinese) and I were looking over a McDonald's receipt, and came across a character we didn't know. We went to a character dictionary, and found the item oddly difficult to translate. We tried to put the food item into Google Images, and returned a lot of pictures of dogs. After a few uncomfortable jokes, we looked at the receipt again, and realized we'd picked the wrong character by something very small; it was something like a vertical stroke going slightly above a horizontal line. We grabbed the correct character and punched it into Google. Turns out it was just a Big Mac.