From time to time strange artefacts of earlier emails creep into the ‘final’ version.
I confess to the occasional (your opinion may vary) convoluted or incomprehensible thought due to editing out something but leaving a related bit in the story, where it then makes no sense.
So I had to smile when I got some reply material from the city this morning. In the middle of the para, written in typical bureaucratic impersonal, noun free form, was this:
.. . I say we just ignore this until it gets brought up again. By that point, it will be [too late].
Please reprint the entire letter, so us readers can see the context. Wow, City of Ottawa.
i will not reprint the whoie thing since the objective is not to embarrass or burn the contact at city hall, I need what contacts i have.
All public consultation seems to be perfunctory only in this City. You have some chilling proof. One has to wonder where “they” get the “creative” ideas. Also let’s remember “they” write all the minutes and summaries of meetings. The pen has the power. Who will actually get any of these accounts edited to insert their omitted uncomfortable comment. And then what? “Just ignore them…”
MS Word (and other word processing programs) allow comments to be added and shared among people working on the same document. Sometimes those comments are not noticed by others since, by default, the comments are not displayed. This can lead to trouble if a document is sent out with comments (or other meta-information) still embedded in it. Sometimes outsiders get more information than intended if they display the embedded information. People need to be careful to scrub out the meta-information in files before they are distributed.