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mjb
·@krogerfoot you had me at "editors who generally prevent howling disfluencies and typos from reaching the publishing stage".
I am a professional writer (in the sense that I occasionally get paid, not that I am any good or pretend to be any good) as a part-time thing, and few things annoy me more than my editor changing my prose and getting it wrong. This goes for picture captions as well as outright modification of the text. It's fine if he makes it better or clearer, which he often does. But as often, he inserts misspellings and just plain wrongness. I can't really complain, because he's the guy who decides to buy my stuff.
I confess that I really get torqued when I read badly proofed stories in the NYT or WSJ, both paradigms of newspaper writing (albeit from opposing views) and yet as we (in America anyway) do more and more "writing" to each other via text messaging, forums like this or emails, it seems that adhering to proper grammar, punctuation and dare I suggest, spelling, have gone the way of the rotary telephone. In other words, no one seems to care, beside us old-fashioned pedants.
What was my point?
Oh yeah, thanks.
I am a professional writer (in the sense that I occasionally get paid, not that I am any good or pretend to be any good) as a part-time thing, and few things annoy me more than my editor changing my prose and getting it wrong. This goes for picture captions as well as outright modification of the text. It's fine if he makes it better or clearer, which he often does. But as often, he inserts misspellings and just plain wrongness. I can't really complain, because he's the guy who decides to buy my stuff.
I confess that I really get torqued when I read badly proofed stories in the NYT or WSJ, both paradigms of newspaper writing (albeit from opposing views) and yet as we (in America anyway) do more and more "writing" to each other via text messaging, forums like this or emails, it seems that adhering to proper grammar, punctuation and dare I suggest, spelling, have gone the way of the rotary telephone. In other words, no one seems to care, beside us old-fashioned pedants.
What was my point?
Oh yeah, thanks.
