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Subject:RE: An Editor's Role...To Punish the Writer? From:SteveFJong -at- aol -dot- com To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Sat, 29 Jun 2002 10:50:12 EDT
Worzel Gummidge <worzel_gummidge -at- lycos -dot- com> is unhappy with the state of
editor-writer relations, and describes an editor who slashes and burns the
manuscript, then tells the world about it.
I've worked with some wonderful editors in my time (hi, Cathy!), and the best
of them hold the writer-editor relationship as private. To me, the real
problem isn't the slashing and burning, it's the broadcasting. That's
unacceptable.
Mind you, if you go to work for a company, and the editor changes all your
bulleted lists to dashed lists and says "this is how we do things here," then
you'd better learn to love the dash, because it's house style. If you
subsequently turn in a draft with bulleted lists, the slashing and burning
becomes your fault.
By the way, once you all get to the point where drafts go through cleanly,
the editor still plays an important role: creating the style guide, which
lists those areas of agreement--dashes instead of bullets, say--so that
writer N+1 has a chance to do things right the first time instead of enduring
the slashes of the learning curve.
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