For the past year, I've been an officer of a club that requests funding from several sources. The club instructor has been teaching here for many years and is very invested in the club. Since he is very familiar with the plans for all of our annual events, he usually writes a first draft of the funding applications. However, since it's my name and my signature that goes on them, I always do the final editing. This man has an interesting approach to capitalization, punctuation, and parenthetical comments.
The capitalization tends to look like he capitalized normally (beginnings of sentences, proper names, etc.) and then loaded a shotgun with capital letters and fired it at the page. Some of the odd capitalizations look like a misguided effort to emphasize a word, but others completely baffle me. I also remove a lot of commas (that must be the second round of shotgun fire) and a lot of parenthetical statements that seem irrelevant or redundant.
As an example of his style, he will write an email to me and other club officers that says something like:
"Onyx, please contact Mary (Venue Event Manager) about the Weaver's Swimmeet (vintage underwater basketweaving workshop) and tell her we will need a Microphone for Dr. John Weaver (Expert Underwater basket Weaver and Teacher with 18 years Experience)."
First of all, all "Mary" needs to know is that we want a microphone. She doesn't care if its for Dr. Weaver, basket-weaver extraordinaire, or an Elvis impersonator. Second, Dr. Weaver's years of basket-weaving experience have nothing to do with whether he needs a microphone; he needs a microphone because he has a quiet voice and is teaching in a large venue. Third, all the recipients of the email know Mary, and what type of event we're having, and who Dr. Weaver is, and why he is teaching here, etc., etc. We've been planning the darn event and dealing with Mary for every previous event this year!
