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

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

> On Oct 1, 2017, at 8:18 AM, Dick Margulis <dick [at] dmargulis.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.

Especially with writing. Some welcome it but not others. 

I didn’t mean to make it sound like the site was filled with bad writing or 
errors. Many of the corrections probably would not even be noticed by the 
author. Subject verb agreement, a clear sentence subject, wrong form of 
their/there — stuff like that.

> 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.

I was teaching in college when I became friends with the publisher of a copy 
editing newsletter. It was not only revealing about what was not a “rule” but 
caused conflict with our writing professors who were still teaching all those 
rules. And through the Oxford comma was no longer allowed in professional 
publications.

I think the tone of the website should be informal and familiar, but there are 
a few things. like subject verb agreement would add fluidity. I don’t remember 
that any of the things I noticed were in disputed areas.

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org