Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Copyeditor Needed for Coho Website

[Dick Margulis (dick]

I feel like I'm eavesdropping. I'm a professional editor and belong to a 
number of editors' discussion groups, where two recurrent themes are

1. People resent being corrected if they didn't ask for your input, so 
it's generally pointless to send "helpful" corrections to website owners.

2. There's a difference between choosing to do pro bono work for an 
organization you belong to/believe in and working for free because some 
random nonprofit organization asks you to; nonprofits should pay like 
any other client.

Your perspective, Fred, from the other side of the fence, provides 
counterarguments to both of those.

The only thing I would caution folks in this regard is that there is a 
great deal of misinformation circulating in the culture about what 
constitutes "correct grammar." People should not assume that just 
because they've detected something their seventh grade English teacher 
would have marked wrong, there is in fact an error to be corrected. It's 
probably better to err on the side of leaving something alone than to 
fix what wasn't broken, lest hard feelings arise. A great deal of 
professional education for editors, in fact, consists of teaching them 
to let go of those zombie rules and learn how language really works.

Dick Margulis
Rocky Corner, Connecticut's first cohousing community


On 10/1/2017 7:19 AM, Fred H Olson wrote:
> Sharon Villines wrote:
>
> > People write for email and the web much more casually than they would
> > for something intended for print (or homework).
>
> Yes tho I think (hope) people are a bit better about things written
> for the web.
>
> This relates to a theory I have about why so little is in English on
> Danish cohousing and organizational sites.  Almost all Danes
> educated since WW2 have a working knowledge of English and will respond
> to email in English.  My guess is that the English copyediting function
> is too high a hurdle for most small Danish organizations so they do not
> provide many pages in English.
>
> Of course there is https://translate.google.com/ but it does not have a
> copyeditor either.
>
> New eyes
>
> I am not a copyeditor but I find that when I read something for the
> first time (reading with "new eyes"), I notice more of these kinds of
> errors than when I read text I am familiar with (that I have written
> for example.
>
> When I spot such errors on sites of organizations I support, I
> sometimes will send an email point it out to the site maintainer. They
> are appreciative.  I also send broken link reports to organizations I
> support - which sometimes result from typos.  I'd do it more if the
> sites had an email address on their contact page specificlly for the
> web site maintenance folks - sometime it is unclear who to write to or
> one can only send to a general contact address and have them forward
> it.
>
> If we made it easy to report problems and on each other's sites
> and resolved to make such reports we could resolve some errors.
>
> Fred  who welcomes comments on his web pages
>
> --
> Bassett Creek Cohousing, Minneapolis  http://mn.cohousing.org/bcrk/
> Fred H. Olson  Minneapolis,MN 55411  USA        (near north Mpls)
>       Email:        fholson at cohousing.org      612-588-9532
> My Link Pg: http://fholson.cohousing.org
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