I just sent some information to my company’s Senior Vice President for Communications, who is responsible for editing website articles, press releases, etc.
He sent me back this response:
Aaaargh!
Oh my God… in the totally-non-shameless-plug link, Lillian Gish said the following about Eve and her book Platinum Girl-
“What a joy it is… A lovely book, and I know Miss Harlow would be pleased with it, too.”
But she’s not a good writer or anything… don’t trust her with anything but editing other people’s copy…
:rolleyes:
No, that would be cruel to Eve.
Well, no. The revisions woudl be so drastic that Eve could write entire replacement articles if she’d like – how the hell would they know?
I’ll second the recommendation of Vamp. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that our Eve was the Eve that wrote the book!
Did you ask him what it was up?
It’s a problem in our post-literate world: just how many pearls can you spit out before swine who can barely read, let alone write?
It’s something that affects my end of the industry, too (publishing for professional audiences). Two months ago the owners of my company disposed of one of our divisions–and everyone who worked in it. The buyer? A competitor whose fabulous marketing makes up for their crappy content. They’ve little interest in the copy our highly trained specialists have produced, let alone in actually hiring the people who produced it. Never mind that all of these writers took substantial pay cuts to work for my employer in the first place (all are attorneys).
It’s pretty damn depressing.
Anyway you can throw your weight around, Eve, as in, “Well, I’d like to see YOU publish five books by including crap like this!”
Well, I’d kind of like to keep my crappy, annoying job.
My company produces newsletters that are marketed to attorneys and other professionals, but you wouldn’t know it from some of the crappy writing I’ve seen from a few of my coworkers. I was recently asked to help a new legal editor with her writing. The case summaries she churned out made me weep. I recognized the individual words, but she seemed to have a problem stringing them together to form a coherent thought. The managing editor and I had to rewrite her articles two or three times just to make them passable for publication.
The worst part was that she had absolutely no idea she was such a bad writer. Just before she quit last month, she bitched to me that she thought she was doing a great job, despite the fact that her articles came back with more red ink than black and contained comments like “what is the point of your story?” and “you got the holding of the case wrong.”
Actually, I take that back. The worst part was when the managing editor told me she hired this girl because she was the most qualified candidate in the applicant pool. :eek:
We all already know what it’s up.
I’ve posted before on the latest grammar atrocities that percolate up from the depths of my company ("%" for c/o being the latest). Even though part of my job is correcting these things and IMHO it makes the company look really really bad to have stuff go out riddled with errors, it’s been deemed more important to get it produced than to get it right. A bunch of letters were sent out today to “Chase Manhatten Bank” and I’ve lost count of the number of times that wrong apostrophes have wneded their way out to our customers and suppliers. I think my boss doesn’t care because she knows, as I’m beginning to realize, that for the most part the people getting these sub-literate letters are themselves sub-literate and thus will not know any better.
Today though I put my foot down and demanded a correction. A check was being mailed to a vendor via an agent, so the envelope was made to the agent but the check had the vendor’s name and address. The vendor was located in ORVAY, Colorado and the processor had typed OVARY. I told her to re-do it and she tried to get out of it by pointing out the envelope was right. I explained gently but firmly that there was no way in hell I was releasing a check addressed to Ovary, Colorado.
And then I spent the rest of the afternoon making puns about the male and female reproductive anatomy, none of which anyone else got.
It’s tough sometimes being the brains of the outfit.
Heh! Never really thought about my screen name in that context before!
I used to be the sports editor at a newspaper where the style was to rotate between Times New Roman and Franklin Gothic. I always tried to give Times New Roman more appearances.
It’s funny to hear someone say that because of course that makes perfect sense and yet apparently it’s not true! I remember when I first started with my company I reached a point where I just couldn’t keep quiet about people making up words. The idiot president sent out an idiot manual for everyone to read and he asked for feedback. So I marked up about two pages and then I said screw it and I just stuck a note between page 2 and 3 that said the whole thing needed to be thrown out. It had made up words in it and it was senseless. It turned out it was idiotic because some born again girl in payroll wrote it and she got really upset about my comments because it was the first things she’d ever written that wasn’t about Jesus. She privately sent me a telling off letter that had more than its share of Jesus stuff in it and a lot of hilarious errors. What made it extra awesome was that it was all crumpled up like she had gotten so emotional that she said, “Oh screw this I’m not going to waste my time!” and threw it in the garbage, and then fished it out and said, “no FUCK that bitch I’m going to mail this!” To make a long story short we had to be mediated. 
Oh and it turned out to be a tie. 
I got wrapped up in my memories and forgot to make my point. The point was that I said it would make a bad impression if anyone saw it and the girl who wrote it said that she had written it in a “simple to understand mannerism and not to impress anyone.”
Oh! And just try to spell-check or edit a fashion article, with made-up words like “mockneck” and “chic-est”!!!
Fashion editor: “They are words! If we say them often enough, they’re words!”
Maybe you could explain to them the difference between a word and a neologism.
Pfft. She needs to hang a plural-apostrophe error around their necks and sic Bill Safire on them.
What? Try replacing that with “the ne plus ultra of the stylistic vanguard.” Not because I think it’s good; but because I want to hear what they say.
Why are you so sure you’re lucky to have a job? It sounds to me as if the only thing good about your job is the income. I agree you are lucky to have an income while others do not. But I am not so sure that you should feel lucky about having that particular job.
I am not sure there’s anything wrong with editors working ina very trendy field like fashion inventing or using neologisms. It seems to me this goes right along with the implicit edginess in the fashion field.