So, most of you know that I work -- ha, ha, ha... work -- as a freelance editor. I'm not going to talk about it at length here; I just mention it because it's part of the setup for what I do want to post! See, given that much of my work -- ha, ha, ha... work -- is done through a third-party service, I'm required to give brief critiques explaining my changes to the customer.

And I bloody hate writing these things, because they effectively consist of me saying, "I MADE YOUR WRITING BETTER," in various different ways, for an entire page or more. Yes, I make specific changes -- lots of them -- but aside from grammatical fixes there's not a lot of explanation I can supply. "I adjusted the order of your paragraphs in the interest of improving the structure of your document." I MADE YOUR WRITING BETTER. "I rearranged this sentence and removed this unnecessary clause in order to render the statement less awkward." I MADE YOUR WRITING BETTER. Sometimes my changes have to do with stuff like readability and flow -- which really have no concrete or measurable basis** -- and meter, which I think should be somewhat observed in prose even though it's really more important for poetry. I MADE YOUR WRITING BETTER.

Okay, so all of this was basically to introduce this excerpt from a critique I was writing this morning, which I decided to omit for fear of offending the customer. (That can be really difficult, too -- while I'll never tell someone that his/her writing sucks, detailing its original flaws and describing what I did to MAKE IT BETTER can kinda suggest that... even though improving something doesn't necessarily imply that the original bad to begin with.) See, sometimes there are more extensive problems with the original essays that allow me go beyond "I MADE YOUR WRITING BETTER" perseveration, and sometimes I get too creative with that. As in...

Imagine yourself as a job interviewer, and, following twenty back-to-back interviews, you ask your twenty-first interviewee a pointed question. Instead of answering it right away, your interviewee begins, "My heartbeat pounding, I lean back in my chair. Why am I the right person for this job? I chew my fingernails for a moment. What do I want to say? I do so want to make a good impression..." Yes, you would remember this applicant's response, but you likely would not remember it fondly.

I don't think it's necessarily insulting -- and it does help to explain what was wrong with the original document -- but I can imagine a scenario in which a customer gets miffed at what could be interpreted as a smartass illustration (though this was obviously not how I intended it). I do like the example, however, so I wanted to post it somewhere. 😛

**Heck, you could even argue that they're entirely subjective. Back when she actually used to read my writing, my mother would often complain that it didn't "flow" -- whereas, to me, my writing flows like... something that flows really flippin' well. For her, four- to ten-word sentences flow beautifully. I find them hella choppy. Well, short sentences aren't always bad. After all, you want to vary the length of your sentences. But when every sentence is so brief, it starts to sound very choppy. And unless that's relevant to the writing -- whether you're trying to replicate simplistic speech patterns or stylistically augment your assertion of a particular point -- it's lame. But that's just my opinion.