Thursday, October 21, 2010

A year and a half of online article editing

From ratting out a coworker (5/13/09, How to Report an Employee Not Keeping His Office Clean) to keeping high blood pressure, etc., at bay (10/20/10, Sodium in Sunflower Seeds), in the words of the Grateful Dead, "Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it's been."

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Editing is life; life is editing.

An editor friend of mine is a half glass full, make lemonade out of lemons kind of person. I'm the opposite; perhaps that's why we get along so well-- you know, opposites attract.

I was bemoaning the fact that a proposal I'm editing is absolutely brutal. I told her it's like the worst nonfiction MS you can imagine that has been accepted by an acquisition/development editor who cares only about meeting a quota and not a wit about what Acquisitions traditionally has done.

She said that it sounds like what we try to with each project: making the best of a bad situation. (For two and a half years, I was a colleague of hers, as a freelance editor where she still works as a freelancer -- at a nonfiction publisher in NOVA. So we've both seen our fair share of MS's that never should have been accepted and/or turned over to Editorial.)

After this recent conversation with her -- a variation on the same theme we've kicked around ad nauseum -- it occurred to me that, indeed, editing does imitate life, and vice versa. Our profession would make for an interesting career day, n'est-ce pas?

Thursday, October 7, 2010

From a writer bio

Now this is the kind of credential I like to see in the writers I edit: "xxxx has been telecommuting and freelancing since 1994."

We all know that telecommuting is one the most highly prized and widely respected feathers in the caps of the best writers of our time.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Millions of words

I was curious about the number of words I've edited in my online article editing job. Here are the numbers:

I've edited 5,560 articles @ 450 words/per (assuming that average) = 2,502,000 words. To put that number in perspective, it is about three times the number of words written by Shakespeare (884,646, according to the "Folger Shakespeare Library").

In scanning some of the Bard's quotations, I found one which could apply to the untold number of god-awful articles that are returned to the writers for a rewrite: "We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from... Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements."

Monday, October 4, 2010

When I first became aware of the editing profession

It was around 1973. I was working at Planned Parenthood HQ in NYC.

On the elevator ride up to my office one morning, there were two guys having an esoteric discussion about the use of a particular word, or it might have been about using one word vs. another. I thought to myself something like: Imagine that, having an entire discussion about a word. These guys must be editors, and this is what they do for a living.

That was the first time I even thought about editing and editors. And here I am 37 years later and into my 27th year of editing.

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Forest for the trees

I just edited an article by a writer who is unable to discriminate.

He followed the rule relating to spelling out numbers below 10 to a ridiculous and infuriating (for me) extreme. In his article on the nutritional value of the 3 Musketeers bar, he wrote Three Musketeers in every instance.