Years ago, I remember someone talking about their college class in medieval history, or something similar. One of their assignments, which sounded awesome, was to copy out by hand a manuscript page from your classmate, passing it from person to person over the course of the semester, to see how it turned out in the end. They each were given rules, like one person didn’t like words alone on a line, and another liked larger margins. At the time, I thought they were a little exaggerated, to imitate the effect of years of copying during one semester.
Now with my experiences at the day job, I don’t know about those particular rules, but I feel like I have a much more visceral feel for how drift would happen in copied manuscripts.
I do the final formatting and production on the majority of our reports. Part of that is inserting all the graphics, so I get a list of people’s captions to go with the graphics when I put them in. The variation in styles, even from people working from the same company style guide, is hilarious. Obviously, it’s easy to tell everyone the correct font, but you get all kinds of little idiosyncratic differences in the text:
-The coworker who abbreviates everything possible: “Site overview, view SE”
-The coworker who forgets that you shouldn’t start sentences with numbers: “1907 map showing the site area.”
-The coworker who doesn’t remember that we can add arrows and labels directly on the photo, so locations don’t have to be described in the text: “Site overview, note cobble accumulation left foreground, gully center background, and datum at living tree nearest old snag in left middle background.
-The coworker who clearly would rather not be writing captions: “Site 1.”
-The coworker who thinks “caption” really means “small novel”: “Site overview, view across the rolling hills at the north of the project area, down to the gully that runs parallel to the old railroad grade recorded as Site 2. South of site 2, the project area slopes more steeply, with increased vegetation.
And the ironic thing is, I’ve developed my own rules that I apply to everyone’s captions. It makes the company’s reports consistent, and most of my rules are based on ones of my supervisor’s that she taught me when she passed on the task, but they’re not really any less arbitrary in some cases. Not starting a sentence with a number is a grammar thing, but does it really matter if it says “view SE” or “view to the southeast”? But I feel very strongly about it!
As I’m sure manuscript copiers once did…
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