Job ad of the day

From Craigslist: "Gov't Contractor Needs Strong Writers Immediately (Reston, VA) . . . Qualified applicants will have 0-6 years of experience."

Zero years of experience represents "qualified." It's a race to the bottom.

Writer's comments

Article writers often include comments to us copy editors if they feel that doing so would help us in some way.

Another Mr. Obvious (and there are so many) carries on that proud tradition in his writer's comments for "Landscaping for Above Ground Swimming Pools." He wrote, "I just wrote about what I would do when landscaping around a pool."

I don't know how I could have proceeded without that context.

In a word

One of my freelance gigs involves editing short articles online. The editing process moves through several screens, from selecting articles to final approval.

After the initial edit is saved, the next screen is for review. The three options here are to approve/submit, reject with comments, or send queries back to the author and request a rewrite.

At the bottom of the review page, there's a short bio/blurb written by the author. I suppose some editors might defer more or less to the author depending on what the blurb contains.

I just did an article where the blurb read, in its entirety, "Dennis writes."

Brevity is the soul of wit, or laziness, or paranoia, or super-humility, or something.