Wednesday, April 19, 2006

It Makes My Eyes Bleed

The student editing association at BYU just sent me a few emails regarding job openings. I appreciate the notification, but there’s nothing worse than emails about editing jobs that are full of horrible writing and editing errors.

  • Project management of editorial projects in the fiction, non-fiction, and children’s genres: includes working with authors, contractors, and in-house production personnel on directing rewrites and revisions, editing, source checking, copyediting, proofreading, typesetting, and checking bluelines
  • Doing copyediting, proofreading, source checking, and blueline checking for full-time editors
  • Doing some editing

So let me get this straight: the job involves project management of projects, editing, copyediting, copyediting, and some editing. Sounds right up my alley.

Hi! I said I would email you if I ever got wind of a job opening here, so now I’m emailing! We (at [blank] Co) are looking for a new Electronic Layout and Pagination person for the Paste Up department. Both [blank] and I work currently in Pagination, and we both graduated from BYU with a degree in English and a minor in Editing.

Sounds like these two stayed home the day they went over capitalization in class. Maybe the problem is that they have one degree and minor between them.

And best of all, from the the student editing association itself:

If you don’t desire to get job announcements from [club], please notify us by replying in the Subject “NO JOBS PLEASE” Thank you, and sorry for any inconvenience these adds may bring to you. [club]

This seriously breaks my heart. And then, when I’m done drying my tears, I start scratching my head; if these are the people that I’m up against, why am I still out of work?

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Editing 3 Replies to “It Makes My Eyes Bleed”
Jonathon
Jonathon Owen

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3 thoughts on “It Makes My Eyes Bleed

    Author’s gravatar

    “laffs Uncontrollably”

    Author’s gravatar

    Hahaha. Yeah, I don’t particularly [Blank, Co.] as they opted not to hire me and then put up two more ads about how they need employees.

    I think it’s like Petra said last night–for employers to recognize smart, they have to *be* smart. If they’re not, all they’ll notice is that one of the prospectives wants more money than the other. Clearly, cheaper is better.

    […] I should’ve known there’d be problems. I have very high standards, and I’d been in the program long enough to know that many people who fancy themselves editors are in fact terrible at the job they hope to do for the rest of their lives (see this recent post for more on that). […]

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