Subj : English skills
To   : Arelor
From : Spectre
Date : Wed Oct 19 2022 14:53:00

 Ar> I come from a tech documentation background, so when I think of bad
 Ar> mistakes, I think of functional mistakes. If you assign a wrong
 Ar> number to a part or a diagram, you can cause a lot of trouble
 Ar> for the user.

That seems reasonable, and I'd expect in some kind of tech documentation the
author would know more on what they are writing about to make the work
functionally useful.  Diagrammatical errors I'd associate less with an author
as most authors wouldn't be the illustrative author.  So there might be a
disconnect between the author of the text and the artist.

 Ar> Then there are the instruction sets you cannot replicate for cheap in your
 Ar> home. Maybe you are writing some tutorial for a specific piece of
 Ar> equipment you are very familiar with, but you don't happen to have
 Ar> nearby by the time you are writing, and since deadlines are a bitch
 Ar> you end up finishing the piece crouched in the backseat of a bus.

This sounds like a mash between someone not doing it as a primary role, and
trying to compete in that market.  I know nothing about deadlines, never had
to work to any, at least not since high school.  It strikes me as poor time
management if you need the device on hand and you no longer have it, or its
at home and you're on a bus for some reason. Shrug, I hear what you're saying
but, it seems you're either in the wrong job, or need a better focus on that
job. I don't have any fantastic answer for this.

 Ar> extra times. Keep in mind I have not started about examining plot
 Ar> consistency yet.

This one  seems cut and dried to me, if the author of some fictional work
can't keep the story straight, how is anyone else going to manage it? I'm not
sure proofreaders are going to help that much if at all.

 Ar>  My gripe is the current industry of written fiction pretty much expects
 Ar> authors to deliver a publishing grade work to the publishing
 Ar> house. This means a given author is to deliver a text which is 95%
 Ar> ready for publication, in a formatting determined by the publisher,
 Ar> in exchange for a 85% probability of the publisher sending

This does appear to be unrealistic.  Times change I s'pose, but I'd have
thought the authors job is to tell an entertaining coherent story, that's as
good as they can make it.  After that you'd feed it to your "proofreader",
get it typeset, re-read and head of to print or publish. It's a waste of time
if they haven't even decided they like before even worrying about the
subsequent details.

 Ar> Think of it. The author is supposed to accomplish a titanic task in
 Ar> exchange for a meager probability of it being read. Basically,
 Ar> we are asking writers to do work for value of 250*bucks in
 Ar> exchange of scraps. OF COURSE quality is going to suffer

Short stories for the most part and I might be wrong, make me reminisce about
pulp fiction. If thats the market you're in, then the strike rate has always
been low even in the days of yore. Some ~90 hit the fireplace without going
anywhere so this is not a new phenomenon but the extra work required going by
the above is pointless if that is the case.  Used to be a thing about getting
something, anything published by someone being an accomplishment in its own
right. Perhaps you need a level of that to keep you at it, without looking at
it as a "job".  I think in order to make any kind of serious money in the
writing field you need to either be really lucky and or be truly exceptional
at it, the money makers seem to be the exception, not the rule.

Spec


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