So I’ve been working on all this editing work the last week, which has been pretty cool. It’s much more fun than what I’m usually asked to do – which is read through 40-page annual reports and look for misspelled words and missing dollar signs. And, as I wonder every year, I have to ask myself – who READS these things except me?? Who in their right mind would actually brew a cup of tea, settle into a big cushy chair, and dive into the wonderful world of amortization and five-year earnings summaries? Is there someone out there who really IS interested in the fact that the chairman of the board of directors of a bank in Louisiana graduated from Texas A&M and now runs a 500-acre soybean farm? (And what’s more, do they CARE if “chairman” and “board of directors” are accidentally capitalized??) Does someone actually eagerly turn each page of each year’s report, wondering with breathless anticipation what the next painstakingly-organized financial table will bring? Why, this marvelous fairyland of finances is nearly as colorful and whimsical as Alice’s tumble down the rabbit hole!
Anyway… the editing work has been challenging at times, which is nice, because I’m always up for a good challenge. :) I’ve been reading through some children’s Christmas stories, and editing pages of about 250 words down to around 120 words. The challenge, of course, is maintaining the original storyline while deleting or condensing as much as possible. There’ve been many times when I was working on a page, and decided I’d squished the prose as compactly as I could squish it, only to check the word count and discover it was still 70 or 80 words over its recommended capacity. I have to admit I’ve occasionally come close to resorting to less-than-creative tactics. Perhaps, for instance, starting with a paragraph like this:
It was a cloudy, rainy, dreary day. Jane snuggled under her grandmother’s colorfully-patterned quilt and curved her cold fingers around a steaming mug of herbal tea. She breathed in the scent of chamomile and sipped slowly, careful not to burn her tongue. “This is the perfect day,” she mused, “to catch up on my reading.” She placed the mug on the coffee table, right next to the annual report the mailman had just delivered. “Forty pages of nonsensical paragraphs, financial statements, and notes from the auditors – I can hardly wait! I hope it rains all day.” She flipped to page one and began to read…
And changing it to a paragraph like this:
It was rainy. Jane sat down with tea. She wanted to read. She put the tea down. And then she read stuff.
Fortunately, so far, I have managed to avoid such writing.
And on a completely different, totally unrelated, and slightly disturbing subject – can someone tell me why so many ads are popping up on TV that talk about mucus? Why on earth would I want to hear about mucus??? Even if it’s some sort of medication that will get RID of the mucus... I don’t ever want to hear the word “mucus” when I’m just settling down in front of the TV with a peanut butter sandwich, or, say, a cup of vanilla pudding. I can figure this stuff out on my own, thank you very much. If I’m feeling sick, I am perfectly capable of perusing the cold and flu aisle of my local Walgreen’s without any sort of prompting from the media. Sometimes I wish TV ads would regress to the 1950s or so… when the only ads allowed on television were for innocuous things like cars, and breakfast cereal, and uh, probably cigarettes or something… ah, those were the days… maybe… I wasn’t actually there so I can’t be certain. All I know is that it was a magical time of mucus-free TV…
Yeah, I think this is the first post where I went from talking about writing to talking about mucus in the span of a few paragraphs. Well, THAT can’t be a very good editing job…
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