Thank you for sending me your revised and edited draft of the article I wrote for EB Online on the History of Blankblank. I have the following comments and corrections:
Look, you gibbering cretin, if you wanted fourteen paragraphs of credulous National Enquirer-style crap on the History of Blankblank, why the fuck did you pay a reasonably well-respected PhD in the History of Blankblank n hundred dollars to write the original version for you?!? You could have got as much credulous crap as you wanted off the Internet, absolutely free! And it looks as though that’s just what you did, too.
Is there some rule at EB that an editor on the History of Blankblank has to maintain scholarly balance by being equally (i.e., totally) ignorant about Blankblank and about History? Almost without exception, your editorial changes are either factually wrong or incoherent nonsense. To take a few examples:
The movement you describe as emerging during the “7th–5th centuries BCE” was in fact founded by someone who wasn’t born till the 5th century.
You use “reciprocals” as a synonym for “fractions”. It isn’t.
You stuck in the usual tired old myth about Development X having happened sometime after 600 CE, apparently without noticing that I gave a careful explanation in the same paragraph about why we know that Development X must have taken place at least three centuries earlier.
You write that the Blahblah is “a collection of verses” and throw in a wrenched-out-of-context paragraph I’d written about the genre of verse treatises. As a matter of fact, however, the Blahblah happens to be in prose.
You write that Whatshisname is “believed by some scholars to have been a native of Region A”. Look, asshole, it is believed by some scholars that Velikovsky was right and that Sumerian culture was started by space aliens. As a matter of fact, Whatshisname explicitly says that he’s from Region B.
For fuckingoutloud, doof, if you can’t be bothered to look these things up yourself, why the bloody hell don’t you just leave the article the way I wrote it? Why spend all that money on a trained professional’s best efforts at careful scholarship and then hack it up into an inaccurate, confusing, contradictory mess?
I already spent about twice the time that would make my fee a fair hourly wage in trying to write the best possible original draft of this article for you. Now I’ve got to put in still more time (pushing my rate down to well below minimum wage) just cleaning up your idiotic “editing” to a point where having that article printed over my name won’t utterly disgrace me in the eyes of every knowledgeable member of my profession. Christ on a pogo stick, is this what they pay you a salary for?!
The last straw is this complacent little summary of your butchery in the email you sent me:
Nah, I’ve had dealings with people at EB in the past and they definitely have their share of arrogant half-wits. The editor probably figured that he had to make some changes, otherwise, what would his job be? Better to screw up facts than leave it unchanged.
My regrets to you on having your name linked to the article now.
Not at all. A generally excellent rant. Full marks. I just wish you could have provided specifics, so I could either judge precisely how stupid this guy is (if I’m familiar with the topic) or learn something new (if I’m not). Any particular reason you can’t give the details of whatever it was you were writing about?
photopat hit the nail on the head. The editor has to change something in order to show that he’s The Man in Charge[sup]TM[/sup]. If he doesn’t, then his boss will think he’s not paying attention to his job.
That’s why you need a helicopter.
A helicopter is something obviously, blatantly, flamingly wrong or unnecessary that you put smack in the middle of your work where nobody can possibly miss it, specifically for the purpose of being cut out by The Man in Charge so he can feel like he’s a valuable part of the creative process while at the same keeping his greasy little mitts of the parts of your work that want to keep.
The term comes from a friend of a friend of a colleague who produces documentaries, usually for corporate promotion videos. In all of his itemized proposals, he adds in a helicopter so the video can start off with a panoramic shot of the city (usually for twice as much as the rest of the scenes cost). The account manager in charge of the project inevitably crosses off that one item, and everyone comes out happy: the manager gets to brag about how smart he was for saving the company so much money, and the producer gets to make the video exactly as he wanted.
My dear old dad, who worked for The World’s Second-Best Selling Commercial Jet Airplane Company for about forty years, had some supervisors who were that way. So, for their benefit, he’d put an egregious boner right in the middle of the first sheet the drawing, so they could find it, fix it, and leave the rest of the drawing alone. They were happy, he was happy, the drawing went out on time.
You know, folks, that is some damn good advice: I am definitely going to put in a “helicopter” in every article I submit to an editor from now on. Thank you.
What really chaps my hiney is that this rescue work is taking time away from my own very first editing job, co-editing a volume of contributed essays, in which I am bending over so far backwards to avoid over-editing that my hair sweeps the floor. I can barely bring myself to tweak the syntax of the foreign contributors with weak English, if the sentence isn’t actually flagrantly ungrammatical. Dammit, I thought that was an editor’s responsibility: fix grammar and spelling, regularize the format, check the facts, polish a little here and there for readability, but respect the integrity of the author’s contribution. This sort of blithe little hatchet job is totally outside my previous experience.
And no, I’m afraid I can’t bring myself to give any more details about the subject matter; I’ve already been feeling very guilty and self-reproachful about having said such mean things in public about somebody who is really quite a nice guy and I’m sure is doing the best he can, and anyway the reason there is so much crap out there on this subject is partly that people like me who know more about it haven’t been working hard enough to make it more popularly accessible, so it’s not fair to blame the people who know no better… I guess I just don’t really have the balls for the Pit, do I?
Helicopters are also used in the deisign/layout business. There are clients who feel the MUST change a proof every time they see one. Each proof, therefore, should contain one ovvious and easily-fixable problem.
Sublight, you are a fucking genius, and I think you may have just saved next weekend for me. Next time you’re here in DC, I’ll be happy to hover a beer your way.
You know, what’s really funny is when you throw in the helicopter and they give it to you even though it’s clearly ridiculous. Happened to me one time; I was helping my boss with a nasty personal health insurance claim situation, and in the settlement proposal I threw in a great big helicopter (which my boss thought I was crazy to do, but I pointed out that they’d be SO much happier if there was something in the proposal they could deny – this WAS an insurance company, after all, and denial is the name of their game)), and to everyone’s complete shock, they granted the whole thing. So you never know. Sometimes you DO get the helicopter!
Hey, at least your editors wrote back to you informing you of the changes. I remember when an editorial I wrote was changed overnight. When I went to look at the paper the next morning, a full 75% of the article was rewritten using words, phrases, and entire concepts I hadn’t submitted. Apparently no one from the editor-in-chief down to the copyeditor bothered to phone and inform me of these changes. I was absolutely pissed at the steaming pile of shit with my name on it, out there for the world to see.
The paper was local and not nearly as important as EB, Kimstu, but be thankful you have the opportunity to correct their corrections.
I like the new salty Kimstu, and I intend to steal forfuckinoutloud.
I have a few stories about perversely boneheaded edits I’ve seen made in computer game strategy guides and magazine reviews, but then I’d have to admit to writing such things.
