Wow, that's some short notice; and 31 Flavors: Burn Notice fic

[gwyn]

I got a call today from a woman who runs continuing education at the community college in my part of town, wanting me to run a proofreading workshop that she said she "had enough students enrolled in." It's next freakin' week. I mean, what the hell -- how do you schedule a course without knowing you have an instructor? And it's at 9 am, which is just...not my time of day. It would also mean cutting down my six hour course that I do at the UW to three hours, which...I'm not entirely sure how to do. As it is, I don't really have enough time to get in depth with proofreading, at least, enough that I think people can come out of it knowing what they're doing. But I guess everyone enrolled works for King County, I'm just not sure what kind of proofreading information they're looking for.

Lately I've been proofreading behind a lot of copyeditors who don't know what they're doing. I never know what to say to the people who hire me; I usually just suck it up and repeat the copyeditor's mantra: It's not my book, it's not my book. But it's frustrating. I was telling someone recently about this, that I saw the word staunch used to mean stanch, a fine distinction that not many writers know, and I do not necessarily expect a writer to be smart enough to know the difference, but I damn sure expect the fucking copyeditor to know it. So many of the people I've read behind come out of the UW's certificate program, and it's really clear to me that they remembered stuff like style sheets and whatnot, tools of the trade, but they never learned the most important lesson, which is to strive to know as much about words and usage as you can, and always be learning more. You can't just rest on your reading experience; you have to keep current and open-minded about what's out there.

And I know that people interested in proofreading don't know enough about the basics of type and formatting; sure, they might be able to spot typos, but it's so much more than that. I'm not sure how much I can effectively communicate in three hours. Still, I'm going to go talk to her on Thursday and we'll probably also talk about creating a real workshop of some length to teach it. But geez, one week. I don't know how I'm gonna do this.

I'm behind again on my recs posts, but my rec I wanted to do yesterday is for Burn Notice. I'm always surprised that this qualifies for Yuletide, because it doesn't seem like that small a fandom to me. But I was happy to find this this year; it's a casefic with the voiceover comments like Michael makes in the show, and just dead on voices, especially that commentary. Fiona gets to do splodey stuff, and Sam and Jesse are involved, so it's like old home week, you know?

Living Well (9656 words) by LithiumDoll
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Burn Notice
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Fiona Glenanne/Michael Westen
Characters: Michael Westen, Fiona Glenanne, Sam Axe, Jesse Porter, Charlie Westen, Barry Burkowski
Additional Tags: Post-Canon
Summary:

As a rule, spies don’t have a lot of time for platitudes. Something that applies to the man in the street isn’t usually as relevant to the man hanging a hundred feet above the street – especially if the rope is fraying.

Good things come to those who wait, for example. Or, it’s the journey, not the destination.

Comments

[ratcreature]

Yeah, a week is really not enough advance notice. I know teacher working conditions have become ever more insecure and temporary, but I hadn't thought they had quite reached the hired day labor stage yet...

So what is the stanch/staunch difference? I always thought it was just a spelling variant.

[tazlet]

Seconding ratcreature's question - if a man person of indeterminate gender, but firm faith, stands staunch against all opposition, and a health care provider stanches a flow of blood, while the damn dictionaries cite them as variations...how you gonna whack a mole?

[gwyn]

A lot of it depends on the kind of dictionary you use -- most people tend to use descriptivist ones, which often just chart how words are most commonly used. But that's part of what being a copyeditor entails -- we're the ones who should know that kind of weird pointless esoteric shit so the writers don't have to. And the thing is, most people believe no one notices, but I can assure you they do. And the really pedantic asshats LOVE to write you nasty comments about how stupid you are if you publish things using the wrong spelling. (Trust me, I worked at Slate.)

[tazlet]

I absolutely believe they notice they notice and complain. I notice and complain. I'd use 'stand staunch' but 'stanch' as a word has never consciously crossed my event horizon; it sounds wrong, but etymology charms me and now I'm squinting at you 'stantion' (which the spell checker in this thing does not recognize, and somewhere in all of this is a pun about going from upright to damnation.

[gwyn]

Yeah, and the worst part is that it doesn't even pay much! I won't really make enough for my efforts in having to figure a way to cut the class down to three hours, let alone actual instruction time.

Stanch is what you do to stop a flow, staunch describes someone who stands strong in the face of opposition. One of the things about most dictionaries is that they're descriptivist, which means they tend to describe meanings of words as they are used -- and over time so few people have been taught this distinction that the dictionary lists them as variants. You see this with a LOT of words. Like I said, I don't expect a writer to know this, because most writers are not super in depth word knowledgeable. But I do expect copyeditors to know this kind of thing, to be familiar with both descritptivist and PREscriptivist dictionaries (the second being the type that tell you proper usage rules and are often a little bit sniffier).

[the_shoshanna]

On my current job, the author used the word "deontology" where I am fairly sure she meant "dentistry," but absolutely sure she did not mean "deontology."

On the bright side, my contact at the press, upon reviewing my work, invited me to request a fee increase, on the grounds that this was developmental editing, yo, not copyediting. (HELP WHAT DO I ASK FOR OMG I SUCK AT THIS,)

[sperrywink]

Wow, booking a class without a teacher, and then still hunting for one a week before is kind of shoddy.

Good luck with the meeting, though.

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

Isn't that just bananas? She said that she got her wires crossed and a bunch of other things that came across to me as someone who is flakey on a regular basis. That always makes me nervous, but it seems that all levels of academia attract these kinds of people. (The people I often deal with at the Univ. of Washington are mostly morons.)

[spasticat.livejournal.com]

It gets me when I'm doing corrections on a copy edited book and the person missed correcting a word that is obviously wrong.