Alan Place - the Editor

 A Freelance Editor

I was an editor for a couple of years; mainly because of the amount of errors I was reading on sites such as LinkedIn by people with degrees from a Unversity; which makde me wonder if the Uni needs so many passes to retain its status?

I shall give you two stand-out examples.

I was on a site called Autocrit for a while, during my timw there we had several tasks to perform. As my grammar was lacking,  wa usually in the bottom 10%, until we had to write a story featuring conversations.

I surpassed my expectaions; I came top of the class in this section, I couldn't believe it. These writers had degrees, and contracts, yet I ran rings round them.

The other example is about the publisher Xlibris - the largest SCAM in publishing - you name a fault, they have done it. On the site PissedCustomer.com, there ae over 40 pages of complaints about them; nobody is 100% perfect, but that many complaints?

Back to my story -

Writers write at times in what is known as a line of thought, this is when you write with no regard to punctuation.

To help a writer I knew, I offered to edit his book AFTER it had been edited by Xlibris --- OMG --- you would castigate a 5th grade student for the work,

I was asked to edit an 80-page book, so, I asked for the first page to see what lay ahead.

The forst thing which hit me, this is not a page, it's a blovk of writing; there were no paragrphs, or breaks; only a solid block of writing.

I pressed on, what had I let myself in for?

Within minutes, I was getting a violent headache.

Words that shouldn't ge capitalised such as sister - family - he'd capitalised. Sister - rank in the church is capiyalised, but not here; even the capitalisation was not constant. 

The worst sin, not the block of writing, was he had converstion in the story, but never changed lines for a different person, even though at times three characters were in conversation.

These are the basics of grammar, he'd got a BA in Criminology, but not English from some University somewhere in Louisiana.

To end this tale of woes, I had to send the page back, and say, "If you want this edited, it's so bad I'll need to rewrite from the start."

Here is the joke, the book is on sale on Amazon; look for Lol Cooper. You have been warned about how bad it is.