Nothing printed? Surely there is still some demand for crosswords, Sudoku, fish-wrap, and bog paper.
I think you are close to 100% right. If what I am typing is beyond about a sixth grade vocabulary spellcheck clutches and reverts, usually insistently and repeatedly, to Little House On The Prairie word choices.
It’s gone downhill since it got taken over by Bay Area News Group. I think the editing is done offshore. I’ve seen headlines placing Seattle in the mid West, and the articles reprinted from the Times get cut off at random places so they fit.
I am routinely shocked at how bad Google is at spellchecking. Either it gets something completely wrong or it simply does not recognize a word (and a common word at that). So much so I consider it to be useless.
I had better spell-checkers in the late 80s. You’d think Google could mange it at least as well.
That is my impression as well. I seem to have experienced a great increase in issues just over the past couple of years, texting on my iPhone and writing on my MacBook. I would assume that the algorithms would have advances such that they are able to recognize some not crazy abbreviations or slang terms - especially in context - instead of replacing with some absolutely nonsensical word.
I suppose it would work wonderfully if I were a touch typist and were not looking at the keys while I typed. If I were looking at the screen, I would see and be able to reject their prompts. I wonder what percentage of the entire universe of phone/keyboard users have that level of ability…
Of course, I only had one term of Latin before it was decided that was no longer relevant.
Do, dare, dedi, datum
It was a private school, and with an influx of public school students for the high school classes - the Spanish teacher complained he’d had to stop Spanish for a while and give an intensive grammar lesson for those students to grasp the plethora of rules that is Spanish.
So would I, and agreed.
Two years ago I went back to technical writing/editing after three years as a proposal manager (and seven years as a proposal writer/editor before that), but first I looked into becoming a freelance editor – or even a full-time editor somewhere. Ultimately, there just wasn’t enough demand. I even reached out to a large, well-known company that provides freelance proposal writers, and they said their clients never request (people who are just) editors. It made me a little sad, because editing is what I love to do. I get to do some editing in my current job, but not as much as I’d like.
I actually volunteered as a proofreader for a local arts magazine for a few years. 
Yeah, there’s that, too. I was OK with the idea of a pay cut, but not a pay decimation. 
As for spell-check, I’ve been a tech/prop/comms writer and editor for almost 30 years (with an M.A. in writing and editing and all) and the first thing I do when working on a new computer is turn off MS Office’s spelling and grammar check functions. Those little squiggles drive me crazy, and nearly always flag things that are actually correct.
(Because I’m only human I will often run spell-check after I’ve done my own editing and proofreading passes, but I hate “flag as you type” – and autocorrect – functions.)
In the unlikely event you or anyone reading this thread has someone never seen the infamous Giles Coren missive castigating copyeditors for a small change to what he wrote, I present the most awesome venting of spleen ever over an editor’s tampering.
Note that I’m not accusing you of inappropriate hubris over your writing - I just never miss an opportunity to share this tidbit as it had me rolling on the floor the first time I read it.
ETA: dammit, that link doesn’t seem to include Amanda’s answer, which is quite delightful. If I find a link that has it, I’ll post it.
It turns out I have the exchange in a Word doc on my computer. The answer is 445 words. Are we allowed to cut-n-paste that much text into this message board? If so, I’ll post it, if anyone is interested.
Why would we not be interested?
You may hide a quote in a “details” block if you think it is too long.
Damn, all that coming from a … food writer? I mean, he’s not wrong about being irked by the changing of “a nosh” to “nosh” – it really does seem to be an idiotic change – but jeez Louise somebody has an anger management and inflated self-importance issue. (And I love how they printed the letter, I presume, completely unedited, which I get is the point.)
I checked with the mods and unfortunately I’m not allowed to post that long a letter. I’m really surprised it isn’t floating around the internet; the only place I can find it is as a pdf in the archives of Harper’s Magazine, which is where I first encountered it. However, I think you have to be a subscriber to access it. (If you are, look for “The Joke is Gone” in 2008.)
Anyway, I’ll quote a little bit of it…
There was a sharp intake of breath when your email hit the inbox of subs throughout the industry this week. That was after we’d stopped laughing. Not that we didn’t think you had a point…we can see why you’d be furious at the loss even of an indefinite article.
…But did you really have to be so rude?
If you could only see the state of some of the raw copy we have to knock into shape. It’s badly structured, poorly spelt, appallingly punctuated, lazily researched. We’re not saying your writing falls into that category. On the contrary, your journalism is highly accomplished. Never having worked on your copy, we can only take your word for it that it is beyond improvement in its pre-published state. Strange as it may seem, many writers do not possess your grasp of language; indeed, it is sometimes difficult to believe that English is their mother tongue, and they don’t give a damn about what they produce because they know that a good, often highly educated subeditor will correct it, check it, and turn it into readable prose.
None of this can excuse your nasty, bullying, “know your place, you insignificant little fuckwit” email. Yes, it’s funny, in a way that pieces that use “fuck,” “shit,” and “cunt” so liberally often can be, but, please — someone made a mistake. He surely had no intention of sabotaging your deathless prose.
There’s more, but you get the idea.
Yeah but not the folks coming out of J-school. If you want to do journalism you still go into print even as it’s dying.*
I worked in TV news for 25 years. Toward the end of that time I don’t think there were any new reporters who could even tell you what J-school is. These people want to get into entertainment, not journalism.
I’m not intending to completely bash them either. Some still have instincts of wanting to fairly convey a story to viewers–their heart is in the right place, some of them, but they’ve been raised on and taught to do “info-tainment”. Even at it’s best it’s a “different” method of conveying news items. But “different” is probably the most appealing term I can truthfully employ here.
- There will always be “print” but more and more that means writing for a website. If it’s a quality site then it’ll be the same as writing that ends up ink on dead trees for the Times or the Post.
His first non-fiction book was titled Anger Management for Beginners: A Self-Help Course in 70 Lessons.
The title is, of course, ironic. It’s a collection of his caustic columns.
He is also the son of Alan Coren, it turns out. He was never known in the U.S. and I have no idea how well remembered he is in Britain, but Alan was not just the editor of Punch but a humor columnist himself, whose columns comprised some of the funniest collections ever. They were next to impossible to find in America pre-internet and I leapt upon them whenever I stumbled across one.
I’ve also seen offers for freelance editing jobs that aim at training an editing artificial intelligence: They’ll send you editing work produced by the AI, and your job is to either OK it if the AI did it fine, or improve it if it isn’t. So you’re directly contributing to the automation of your own work.
[Bolding mine]
TL, DR - the web has made everyone lazy, including folks how should care and know better. Like the SDMB.
One nice thing about “the old days” with better editing and so forth is good editors make sure a final piece is as clear and readable as possible so readers wouldn’t give up and move on after the first sentence.
To use the above quoted post as an example, a good editor would insist that “FSM” be clarified so the reader would have no doubt that “FSM” stood for “Flying Spaghetti Monster” and not something else.
As I have oft pointed out, this has also become a big problem on Facebook, Twitter, and, here on the SDMB One big problem is people are lazy and don’t care about their readers. I figure: “Hey too bad for FB and Twitter but that shit don’t play on the Dope!!!” Until I realized that, yes, yes it DOES play on the Dope. And that really irks.
Folks here would say — “bah, it doesn’t matter— look it up if you don’t know it!” But you’re not allowed to write out a sentence of Dutch and then when people complain say: “Some people know what I meant… if you don’t, just look it up!”
Doping should be better than than that but apparently I am in a distinct minority in that opinion. I wantted comment in this this thread because this thread is about as close as average Dopers will come to agreeing with my ideas on this.
You can’t look up a three letter acronym. Every TLA has several possible meanings.
Exactly.
I used to typeset a long time ago but I’m not up on modern software versions of that.
But, it seems to me that most hyphenation is eliminated not so much with “micro-kerning” but simply by the standard web practice of justifying left and having it all “rag” on the right side. Easy/peasy.
I are both a editor and an proofreader. Didn’t no their were still typesetters though. I useta was one, many years ago.