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One of the most tedious and thankless jobs at any regularly updated publication is that of line editor, or the person who actually sits down with a few thousand words of someone else’s work and combs through every detail checking for errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation and sentence structure.
It is a job every bit as critical as the original effort put into a piece of writing. New readers can be engaged by one of our articles, and absorbing the message, only to be instantly deflated when they encounter mistakes.
But preventing that is such a pain in the ass that very few people like to do it, even for money. Needless to say, getting someone to do it for free, and on a demanding schedule that supports an ongoing and unforgiving need for “right now” attention, well, it is like trying to find a feminist that supports equal treatment under the law for everyone.
We found such a rare person anyway. Or rather he found us by raising his hand when it counted.
George Olduvai, a reader of AVfM and a lover of professional presentation, has stepped up to the plate to help us bring you articles that are not undermined by misspelled words and other mistakes. He has suited up for all our benefit, and we are indeed grateful for it.
With his arrival and commitment comes a modification to our submissions process that will affect ALL writers for AVfM that do not already have a contributors account with admin privileges. Henceforth, all material submitted to AVfM needs to be sent to articles@avoiceformen.com, in a word document if at all possible.
And a side note here, with all respect to our valued contributors. It is George’s job to polish up articles AFTER you have practiced due diligence in getting things right to begin with. Articles that are submitted with numerous, unnecessary mistakes, that appear to have that “I’ll let someone else tend to the details,” appearance will for sure be attended to, but not in the way you want.
In short, if you won’t bother to run it through a spell check, we won’t bother to run it on AVfM.
Let’s help George help us with professionalism coming in the door.
The end result of this will be a greatly enhanced publication with a smoother, more credible user experience.
I said this was a thankless job, but please join me in thanking George Olduvai just the same.
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