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Subject:Re: Editorial Latitude From:Mitch Berg <mberg -at- IS -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 11 Apr 1997 11:14:25 -0500
> I take it that this was your first magazine article.
>
> Periodicals are put together at a blinding pace, with all articles
> rudely edited and then savagely chopped to fit the space available.
> I prefer to think of magazine editors as highly skilled surgeons
> who use axes instead of scalpels.
The exception might be literary quarterlies put out my university
Literature grad students.
No, I've never published in one of them...
> I have never yet had an article appear in undamaged form in a
> magazine.
True story - I was once the editor of a (biweekly) college newspaper -
really more of a magazine, given it's frequency.
And I chopped my OWN stories up pretty badly!
Moral of the story - sometimes to hit the (impossible) deadline, you have
to compromise a bit on "Perfection". It's negotiable in TechComm. It's
the law in periodicals.
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