Thursday, December 31, 2009

2009's Least Helpful Help

It's a toss-up.

First up, there's Word Help. (How do you construct a macro? How do you convert straight quotation marks to curlies in existing text?)

And, of course, contending is the Chicago Manual of Style. There are so many times when (1) what I'm looking for is not in the index location that most reasonable people would expect it to be, and (2) CMS equivocates on rule after rule.

These tools of my trade need some serious sharpening.

Monday, December 28, 2009

Stop. Go directly to syntax jail. Do not pass go.

A title writer (for my online article editing job) apparently has reached his limit in terms of articles about investing.

To wit: "Rules for Stopping the Stock Market."

Or perhaps he just had his fill of holiday shopping.

Friday, December 25, 2009

Where Bad Writing Goes To Die

Here's how my online article editing job works in terms of article selection.

After I log in, I pull up my queue which contains ten titles ready for editing. I can select any one of the ten. Once I pick one, I can do one of three things with it: edit/approve/submit it, edit it and submit it to the writer for a rewrite (this generally seeks clarification), or save it back to the hold area of my queue. If I choose the latter, I have 24 hours to edit it.

If, however, I don't return to that article within 24 hours, it will go back into general circulation for another editor to select.

It is reasonable to conclude that many editors use this option to avoid working on articles that are so badly written, they can't bear the thought of spending an inordinate amount of time to salvage them. After all, we're paid per article, so working on articles of this nature cuts deeply into our hourly pay.

I exercised this option today with an article about online banking. The introduction contained these nuggets:

"Traditional banking and all it alludes is slowly becoming a thing of the past." And: "Online banking gives you access to self serving features."

That was more than enough for me to send the article post haste to the Death Pool. I would imagine that there are some articles out there that don't see the light of day for quite a while, as one editor after another throws them into the dark abyss.

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Working at home, cont'd

Seasonal upside: I don't have to deal with that Secret Santa crap and devote precious brain power to decide what to buy for an a'hole co-worker.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

MY Three Sirens

I may have left FT employment, but my freelance editing requires at least as much time as I was putting in on my job prior to "retirement."

Today, for example, I spent five hours copy editing on my current book project, then many more hours editing sixteen online articles followed by seven mystery shopper reports (my latest freelance job).

Sometimes I think it would be better to simply crash into the rocks. This is a ridiculous way to spend my "golden years."

Call me Ishmael Odysseus.

Napalm by any other name

To paraphrase Robert Duvall's "Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore" in "Apocalypse Now": I love the smell of an egregious error in the morning. It smells like . . . stupidity.

I just edited an article on teaching kids about rivers. It contained this: "Advanced transportation such as airplanes has reduced our alliance on rivers."

Monday, December 21, 2009

She's not heavy. She's one of my writers.

I just edited an article for my online content job. It was written by an "experienced and published" writer (according to her bio). The article was on meteorological science projects for school kids.

In the 350-word article, she consistently misspelled lightning as lightening.

The company needs to lighten its load of these writing hacks. Either that, or hope for lightning to strike some of them.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

This is why I double-lock the door to my sixth-floor balcony.

Here's an excerpt from a short online article I'm copy editing:

"Succeed in area competitions and make you'll be on you way up the latter to compete at the highest rungs of the spelling bee circuit."

The article is entitled, "What Are the Benefits of Participating in a Spelling Bee?"

And it continued in that vein to the very end.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come

I just started editing a new manuscript. I was immediately faced with huge swaths of quoted material without references.

I think it's time that our profession organize in an attempt to stop this crap from reaching our desks, computers, mailboxes, whatever.

And I have the perfect name for our organization:

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Factoid

I was just listening to an interview on NPR during which the guest repeatedly said, "In point of fact."

Let me state for the record that, in actual fact, that expression quickly grew old.

As a matter of fact, I turned off the radio.

In fact, excessive verbiage, be it written or verbal, always should be avoided.

Illiterates need not apply.

A public health research and consulting firm in northern Virginia is seeking a senior editor.

One of the required qualifications is "fluency in written and oral English."

I wonder if the firm has less stringent requirements for editors below the senior level.

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Commiserating

(A short conversation with two of my kindred spirits.)

ME (to V and J): "One's standards cannot possibly be maintained for two months!" In other words, and as you know, when we're working on a piece of crap for what feels like forever, we reach a point when we pretty much go into an auto mode just to get the damned thing done. At that point, many of the items on our "final checklist" somehow don't seem necessary any longer.

V: That’s because at that point they aren’t necessary!

ME: And that begs the question, debated ad nauseum by our brethren and sistren, How much of what we do is truly necessary?

J: Depends—if you ask the general stupido, s/he will say barely anything; just catch the typos. If you ask those who know (writers, for instance), they’ll say a lot, “as long as it isn’t my writing!”