No matter how much I bang on about plain English and stuff, well… it’s as if people don’t understand the words. This week my life has been plagued with people who think that writing web content clearly, and following accessibility criteria, will make their god-awful content boring. It’s enough to drive any right-thinking web editor completely insane. › Continue reading
Sometimes I think isolation is a good thing and only adds to the quality of an editorial life. At other times – surrounded by words and expressions I don’t understand and yearning for a sentence in concise, plain English – I feel lonely. So imagine my delight this week when someone dangled some bad writing at the Dangling Modifier.
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After my trip out last week, I felt that nothing and no one could harm me. My gamble on the hokey pokey ice-cream paid off and taught me a valuable lesson: all this time I’ve been worrying about understanding the words, and the truth is, I probably don’t need to. › Continue reading
I have been getting increasingly depressed about not understanding the words. What with that, and having to work through all that stuff about sewage, last week my life as an editor seemed to be at an all-time low. Then, rushing to meet my Friday deadline, I ran into a nightmare 57-word sentence. › Continue reading
Every B2B editor is familiar with jargon – it’s one of those things we live with. The buzzwords, the key phrases strung together like the lumps in a length of drool coughed up by a heavy smoker. We live with it, edit it – where possible we delete it. But what was I to do when I came across ‘sewerage undertakers’ this week?
Businessdictionary.com sent me the definition for ‘sustainability’. I was pleased. This is one of the words that I rarely, if ever, understand and yet it comes up so often in editorial work. I suspect the conspirators who laugh at editorial staff promote the words ‘sustainable’ and ‘sustainability’ just to cause confusion. They come up in almost every topic, apart that is, from plain English. › Continue reading
If you want an example of how not to write plain English, then it’s always worth taking a train. This week, my exciting life as a busy editor took me as far as my local station, where I very much enjoyed reading a notice from Network Rail about the temporary closure of my booking hall. › Continue reading
I have been considering my prospects in editorial work. Humanity will always need people who can make sense of business speak and political nonsense and rewrite it in plain English. But the trouble is I have so much trouble understanding the words, I can barely lay claim to being one of those valuable people any more. › Continue reading
Great news this week: the recession is at an end!
Phew! To think how worried we all were last October when I started this blog, about the credit crunch and what sort of impact it might have on editorial staff and standards. I know I wasn’t the only one who feared that business people – in their collective madness – might cut back on copy-editing and proofing. Fortunately, the recession is over and we can look forward to plenty of work as the number of B2B websites and publications increases. › Continue reading
It was a couple of years ago, I think, when I was first told not to use the term ‘brainstorm’. I was freelancing at some public sector organisation. I remember the deputy managing editor of the website telling me that the word ‘brainstorm’ is offensive to epileptics and I laughed uproariously – thinking this was some very witty joke – only to realise a moment later that no one else was laughing and that this bloke was being serious. › Continue reading