Thursday, January 31, 2013

Just doing what an editor does

One of my colleagues called me obsessive-compulsive. It hurt then, and it still hurts a few months later.

For the majority of my working life, and even in high school and college, I worked an editor, and I'm still an editor.

The colleague asked me to review a piece of correspondence. It was full of punctuation errors, including extraneous quotation marks, the period outside the quotation marks (and single instead of double quotation marks at that), missing commas before the conjugation in two independent clauses, and numerous other errors.

I corrected some, although I left the quotation marks.

Her response? She told me I was obsessive-compulsive.

1 comment:

Her Artichoke Heart said...

What!? Well, as someone who practically breaks out into hives when I see a comma in the wrong place, I say take the "obsessive-compulsive" crack as a compliment! Better than being a horrible writer. Sheesh. :O