{"id":110,"date":"2008-05-22T21:26:15","date_gmt":"2008-05-23T03:26:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/?p=110"},"modified":"2010-09-19T09:56:17","modified_gmt":"2010-09-19T15:56:17","slug":"my-glittering-second-career","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/my-glittering-second-career\/","title":{"rendered":"My Glittering Second Career"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a bad habit\u00c2\u00a0of writing in books.\u00c2\u00a0 Only textbooks, and only my own books, but it’s still a bad habit. I highlight key passages, make notes in the margins, and underline important concepts.\u00c2\u00a0 I even cross out bits I disagree with.\u00c2\u00a0 I know that you shouldn’t deface books (lord knows I had my knuckles rapped for it often enough at school) but I read a lot of textbooks, and this makes it easier to find back key information when I’m looking for it.\u00c2\u00a0 Plus, I find I actually retain more\u00c2\u00a0of what I read\u00c2\u00a0this way.<\/p>\n

An extension of this (and probably a worse habit) is that I mark up grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors in books that I’m reading (and here I extend the habit to novels, magazine articles – in fact, just about\u00c2\u00a0anything short of a flyer).\u00c2\u00a0 I see this as an occupational hazard; after years of proofing and editing other people’s work, I’m entirely incapable of letting a misplaced modifier pass unmarked, or an errant comma go unchecked.\u00c2\u00a0 Fortunately, most commercial publications have few errors, so it’s not as distracting as it could be.<\/p>\n

Toward the end of last year I was building my Wiki (TechWriterWiki<\/a> – shameless plug).\u00c2\u00a0 I’d done all the basic configuration, but wanted to take it to another level and was looking for\u00c2\u00a0some documentation on MediaWiki\u00c2\u00a0(the platform on which I built it) so I could figure out what possibilities there were.\u00c2\u00a0 MediaWiki is freeware, so there’s not a great deal of documentation for it.\u00c2\u00a0 What there is, is (unsurprisingly) a Wiki (also built using MediaWiki), which is very patchy, poorly organized, and difficult to find information in.\u00c2\u00a0 So I bought a third-party publication on MediaWiki from Amazon.\u00c2\u00a0 A couple of pages in, I noticed a spelling mistake and, as I do, I marked it up.\u00c2\u00a0 Then I found another.\u00c2\u00a0 Then another, and another, and so on through the entire book, until I had marked up just about every single page – and most pages more than once.<\/p>\n

Given that this was a commercial publication – for which I’d forked out $39.99 – I was pretty irked at this.\u00c2\u00a0 What rankled more was that in crediting just about everyone involved in the publication of the book within the book, the publishers had listed no less than five editors, two reviewers, and a proofreader.\u00c2\u00a0 So in a fit of pique I wrote (to) the publishers, listed all of the errors that I had found, and suggested that they sack the entire editing team, as its members clearly hadn’t even read<\/em> the book.\u00c2\u00a0 As a final kiss-off, I suggested that although I had now proofread the book for free, if they wanted me to review any more books for them, they’d have to pay me for it.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, I never heard back from\u00c2\u00a0the publisher.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Time passed, and I never thought any more of it. I did buy another book (on Documentum) from the same publisher, and was relieved to find that it contained significantly less errors – and listed a different set of editors, reviewers, and proofreaders, so maybe they’d taken my advice and sacked their editing team.\u00c2\u00a0 But then last week I received an e-mail from the publisher’s Editing Team Leader, asking if I could proofread a new book for them.\u00c2\u00a0 Being entirely incapable of backing down, I naturally accepted the offer.<\/p>\n

So on Monday morning I received the first set of chapters for a book on Blender 3D (an application for three-dimensional modeling, in which I’m now an expert!).\u00c2\u00a0 Over the next few days, more chapters arrived, and I stayed up half the night proofreading them and marking them up, before sending them back the next morning.\u00c2\u00a0 The drafts I received were about the standard of the MediaWiki book (which reinforced my opinion that that book had never been proofread) so it took quite a bit of work to knock them into shape.\u00c2\u00a0 Apart from marking up the numerous grammar and punctuation errors, I had to remove quite a lot of ‘unnatural’ English (clumsy wording, or phrases that just weren’t how people actually talked).\u00c2\u00a0 Now I’m going to go out on a limb here, and hazard a guess that the author’s first language is not English.\u00c2\u00a0 In fact I’d bet my (depressingly small) proofreading fee on him (or her) being Indian.\u00c2\u00a0 After many years of editing and proofing the work of many different nationalities in my real job I’m pretty adept at telling French-English from Polish-English from\u00c2\u00a0Singlish from Indian-English.\u00c2\u00a0 No matter.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what proofreaders are for, and I’m happy to do the work.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately my moonlighting didn’t last very long.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0By Friday morning (four days after I’d received the first drafts, and bearing in mind I’m also holding down a full-time real job at the same time) I’d reviewed half the book (some 150+ pages) when I got a note from the Editing Team Leader informing me that they needed to “upload the book” (presumably to the printer) on Monday, so they’d assigned another proofreader to the remainder of the book, and I was therefore relieved of my further proofreading responsibilities.\u00c2\u00a0 Being naturally paranoid, I took this as a personal slight on my work (or speed of work), but the Editing Team Leader was kind enough to drop me another note apologizing, explaining that it was just because they had a tight deadline, and saying that as my “work\u00c2\u00a0is quality” they would be in touch with more work later.<\/p>\n

So, until some other young gun with a red pen (or copy of Acrobat Suite, in this modern age) reads the Blender 3D<\/em> book, takes umbrage at the number of errors – in the second half, of course! -\u00c2\u00a0and suggests that the publisher sacks the entire editing team and hires them<\/em>, I guess I have a second job.\u00c2\u00a0 And as the publisher is based in Mumbai, I’m in the unique position of being on the receiving<\/span> end of outsourcing from<\/span> India.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a mad, mad, flat, flat world!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a bad habit\u00c2\u00a0of writing in books.\u00c2\u00a0 Only textbooks, and only my own books, but it’s still a bad habit. I highlight […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,13],"tags":[45,68,44],"class_list":["post-110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-work","tag-moonlighting","tag-proofreading","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":202,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions\/202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}