The Complaining and Bitching Thread

I ran into this when trying to proofread a fellow cohort member's thesis. I got two paragraphs into the literature review and wrote him an email stating that what he had looked nothing like a literature review, and that he ought to fix that. He only had a handful of citations! He also had some linguistic quirks that he kept repeating. Even when editing student papers, if they make the same mistake over and OVER and over again, I will often circle the mistakes and hand it back for a preliminary revision, just so I don't get annoyed.

 

Who in their right mind would proofread 110,000 pages for $100? I thought $400 was low-balling it.

 

The guy apparently has an "editing" company. He isn't necessarily desperate for money. I mean, if he's a fairly solid reader, he could get through the book within about 8 or 10 hours. So he'd be making $10 or $12 or so per hour.

A professional proofreader, on the other hand, would only be making something like $3 an hour (very optimistically) at a flat rate of $100. (This is why I bid $400.) Realistically, this job should take somewhere between 40 and 50 hours. If there are unforeseen problems (subpar editing, for example), the job could take much longer than that.

What this tells me is that he either proofreads at a breakneck (i.e., unprofessional) speed, or he is desperate for money and will only get $3 (or less) for each hour of his time.

I'm hoping that the "everyone's an editor" mentality is reasonably balanced with "you get what you pay for."

 

My husband often has to give his notebooks to colleagues for their use or to the professor he works with, since they're all working on projects together. Writing down everything helps a lot, it seems.

 

See, this is the thing....

(I'm really trying to prevent myself from going off on a rant here...)


It's apparent that most writers aren't very good editors—mainly because they don't have any training or experience as an editor. (And many editors aren't very good writers, in large part because they haven't developed the craft.) Writing and editing are quite different functions in language. People tend to associate the two much too closely. While admittedly they're both employed in creating written communications, they aren't the same thing. Writers (the good ones) are excellent at communicating ideas, stories, etc. They are good at making expressions and formulating engaging narratives, whether fictional or non-fictional. In other words, they are good at what to say. Editors, on the other hand, are good at how to say it. There is a lot of crossover between the two, but writers tend to be best at what to say, while editors tend to be best at how to say it.

Writers who view editing as "essentially the same thing as writing," or as "a part of writing—so writing," fail to see what it means to be an editor. The confusion, I think, happens when considering the revision process of writing. Revision isn't the same thing as editing. Revision is still writing. You could call it rewriting if you'd like. A text that requires revision isn't finished being written. It's not ready for editing. It would have too many problems/gaps that would force the editor to do revising (or rewriting) instead of simply editing.

That said, many writers who haven't had the benefit of working with a talented and professional editor don't value the editing process. They don't understand the editing process—that there are standards, conventions, and stylistic consistencies to consider, that there is more than spelling, grammar, and punctuation to consider. They don't understand that good editors are damned good readers who are capable of critiquing writing on a level that would boggle the minds of the majority of self-publishers who've published books without ever hiring a trained professional editor to help them.

The biggest problem with self-published books (a huge percentage of books today are self-published) is that most of them aren't properly edited. There are many reviewers who won't even consider accepting a book if it's self-published. They've seen far too many that aren't even worth it. Until most self-publishers take on a mentality of professionalism (i.e., a focus on producing quality products by hiring professionals who know what they're doing), their publications will always be relegated to the literary ghetto.

Knowing how to write doesn't mean you know how to edit. I've heard stories of successful writers offering their services as an editor only to reveal how inept they are at editing other people's work. Being a good writer doesn't automatically mean you are good editor. There are many brilliant writers who'd be practically unreadable if it weren't for their hard-working editors.

Damn it. Was that a rant?

 

No, @Baraka_Guru, that was an excellent read.

 

I don't know it, but any writer would be blessed to have their work Perkins'd. (I actually recently considered reading Max Perkins: Editor of Genius.)

 

More awesomeness:

"Blah, blah, blah. I've been burned by so-called 'editors' on websites before. I need a real editor. Blah, blah blah."

[Within an hour or two, hires an "editor" willing to "edit" for less than half a cent per word. (About $1.00 or so per page.)]