Friday, September 17, 2004

Somebody hire an editor!!!

I hate, hate, hate it when I open a new issue of a magazine (or worse yet, a book) and see things like this:

"Because it is very easy to loose track of the steeked area, use a contrasting color of thread running up each side as markers."

This monstrosity was on page 25 in the Summer 2004 issue of InKnitter's.

AAARRRRGH!!!!! As an English teacher, I am offended when I see things like this. I swear, one of these days I'm going to have a field day with a red pen and mail an issue back to the editor. I've done enough editing in my day to justify my actions, I think.

There is no excuse for the existence of sentences like that one. Unless you've hired a 17 year old as your lone editor, you should be ashamed of yourself.

4 Comments:

Blogger Amie said...

Things like that drive me crazy, too! It really does change what the sentence means when punctuation and spelling are incorrect!

1:15 PM  
Blogger Kim said...

:-)

You "lose" track, not "loose," and it should be "use contrasting colors of threads as markers" or use a contrasting color of thread as a marker."

The sentence order is actually fine. ;-)

7:34 PM  
Blogger sabrina said...

!!! tell me about it.

i have an accomplishment of which i'm very proud. we publish a "Resource Guide" booklet every fall for the students et al., and this year's came to me (among many others) for commentary. and there were some obnoxious things in it -- like, this is a new thing people have started doing that makes me crazy, putting "double quotes" around "things" for "emphasis" -- that i asked to be eliminated or changed, and they actually did!

hooray for the grammar nazi!

11:24 AM  
Blogger Kim said...

We love the Grammar Nazi!! We wish she would come back to visit!! :-)

9:09 AM  

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