Few online editors rely on a manual of style anymore like CMOS. They may have a self-developed style sheet but that’s it.
Complicated word problems are the province of editors with university presses, literary reviews, or those hardcopy editors working with extremely fussy and well published authors.
Writers should be handing in well polished and straightforward text. It’s up to their editors to solve any complicated word problems which they will deal with in the simplest way possible.
Looking up a thousand different opinions on the internet or in a dozen different style manuals is not the simplest way.
ROUGH AND UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00.990]
Few thoughts on real world, real life sentence, construction, grammatical problems, they are something of an English class not they don’t really live in the real world. For example, if you had a question regarding where to put the apostrophe in women’s liberation, there’s a couple of ways to you know, there’s two different ways to place the apostrophe, which is better just. If if you need to do that and not just simply recast the sentence, which is far quicker, then try both.
[00:00:43.570]
Possibilities in Google search, you’ll see the amount of results you’ve seen this and search engine results, the number of occurrences and go with the majority. It may not be the king’s English, but you are not writing for the king. You are writing for maybe yourself, probably somebody else, somebody that’s hiring you. And this is really the job, though, of an editor. Your job as a writer, as an online freelance contract writer is to deliver a fairly polished piece, underworked count or at word count under deadline, always under deadline.
[00:01:28.300]
And it is for the editor to polish it, to tighten it up. If they have to do too much, polishing, too much work, they’ll let you know. But generally, it’s to the editor to solve these complex questions. And usually they are not really complex to the editor I when I was working with my writers. I could recast a sentence or a couple of words in seconds, I didn’t need to go up on the Internet to find a possible problem.
[00:02:06.870]
And when you go on the Internet, you get all sorts of conflicting advice. That’s why. And a current search with Google is far better is a far better idea. But generally, as an editor, I’ll recast the sentence because the writer doesn’t care about how you do it. He just or she just wants a check and wants the next assignment. Now, unfortunately, these companies like indie dotcom, they’ll give you and I tested I tested writing skills and indeed dotcom and did very poorly.
[00:02:51.720]
But it’s not really a writer’s job in the real world to figure out these things. The only time we’re not we’re not fussy. We’re we’re not Conrado is that we’re not Tolstoi. We’re we don’t care about the where you place the commas. The only time that I have received comments on sentence structure and word usage was from a literary press. They published an article of mine. And I’ve only approached a literary literary press once. And of course, literary presses are all connected with or usually connected with the university or college English department.
[00:03:44.850]
So they are going to be fussy in this case. I thought my article was about 90, 95 percent correct, and I told them, just fix whatever you want fixed. I have my message solidly across and I don’t care about how you fine tune it. I really don’t. As far as where you’re going to place a period or a bunch of quotation marks, I’ve done the majority of work for you. They completely understood and they were happy to do it, to edit it their way.
[00:04:23.220]
And that came out just fine. Sometimes you will get from major magazines proofs where they’ll send you a mock up or a dummy of how the article is going to look. And again, you really don’t care about sentence construction at that point. The only times I’ve had problems with magazine publishers is cut lines or captions. I prefer captions to present something new rather than repeat something in the article. But you’ll find that most editors like the captions to reflect the text.
[00:05:06.300]
But side issue, you can work that out with your editor. But, uh, who cares about semicolons really in the real world? Unfortunately, with the service like indie dotcom, you get tested on that. So, um, where do we stand? So don’t just get get your material, get your assignment in beat word, count every single time, bring it under. Bring it under deadline and the editor will finish it up and like I say, if you’re a new writer and it’s taking too much time and this would often happen with new writers, you have to train them up, bring them along.
[00:05:57.030]
But the only time I ever researched any kind of complex sentence or paragraph construction was when I thought the writer had a really strong set of sentences and that if I did a little bit of work, I could make this even better. But that’s rare. Usually if they’re using a complicated word, I just immediately use a simpler one. Recasting a sentence takes sentence, takes seconds and. And I wish these writing tests didn’t exist, but they do, so you have to muddle your way through and that’s why it’s good to have a resume, a website, so that you can actually put sentences together.
[00:06:45.670]
And again, the editor doesn’t care. The editor’s got so much work to do. They’re not looking this stuff on the web anyway. So, anyway, good luck to you and I will talk to you soon.
