"It's smaller than the last book you did for us," Jack told me on the phone the other day, lying through his teeth. Jack works for an academic program development and publishing company. He sends me teaching manuals for copy editing.

The company's educational approach is grounded in repetition and unity of thought, which makes the teaching manuals read like troop leader handbooks for the Hitlerjügend. I don't know how kids thrive under such strict boundaries (hypnosis? brainwashing?), but the programs seem to work, and I have no objection to the notion of grammar as dogma. Anything we can do to reduce apostrophe abuse is fine with me.

The last project was over five hundred pages of second-grade grammar. The book was an object lesson in the concept of monotony. The tedium was broken occasionally by frenzied efforts to make sense of the arbitrary subheadings and pauses for helpless laughter at factual errors. (In the ten-page mini-dictionary included with the book, the author defined a fox as a wild dog with a bushy tail. I am not making this up.)

Because the estimate given to me over the phone on the last project was two hundred pages short of the actual text and because of the extensive writing and formatting errors, I had to spend a bit more time than I had expected on that book. In between working periods, I would get on the phone with whoever would listen and say, "I will never ever work on a book for this program again. Never."

But, of course, here I am.

This one is the company's version of Hooked on Phonics: it's a learn-to-read program. It should be easy enough work (famous last words). I'd guess it's less than eighteen hours. But first... a nap.