Edited

In my free time I help copy edit articles for our journal. I would have gladly done it for free. At least all along I thought I was doing it for free until recently I got paid, so, YAY!

Some of the articles I see are very well-written, others not so. It’s the not-so-well-written ones that I am writing about. I was told to ensure that the articles are in the proper format, as well as looking for grammatical errors. You would have thought that academics, who write all the time, write well. Apparently, they don’t.

There is a guide for style, based on the Chicago Manual of Style, which I presume is supplied to all the authors. Basically, it tells what font to use, how to format the headings, the format for citation, etc. None of the articles follow the guide perfectly, which is fine as that’s where I come in, but I sometimes wonder if some of the authors even know how to properly use a word processor. I have seen articles that doesn’t seem to have a system for organizing headings.

The author of this article I’m currently looking at seems to have a fetish for italicizing and quotation marks. Every other word is either italicized or in quotes. Some words are both italicized and put in quotation marks. Reading the article, I cannot help feeling that the author is being ironic and cynical. As much as we expect students to follow instructions, I find it extremely annoying that lecturers and professors fail to do the same.

The second part of the job is less annoying but much trickier, as my grammar is far from perfect. Often I am not sure whether to use the past tense or the present tense, so simply go by what I feel right. However, most of the grammatical mistakes are glaring, like a missing article or an incomplete sentence. Generally, I find that academics tend to write very long sentences that by the end of the sentence you forget what is written at the beginning. Haven’t they heard of sentence connectors?

The point of writing is to convey information. You want people to understand what you write. Therefore, as much as possible I think it is best to always try to write short sentences with simple words.