I spend a lot of time writing for a living. My education is in communications (both bachelor's and master's degrees). I was also fortunate to have an aunt who was a school teacher, and she spent many hours reading and teaching me about language when I was young.
Further, I'm a stickler for rules and policies. I understand there's a time to bend - or even break - them, but generally, rules are important.
So, I get incredibly irritated when people proclaiming themselves writers or editors clearly have no grasp of a comma splice or the misspelling of your and you're.
For example, I've started bidding on freelance jobs through a website called Elance. It's a great tool, and I've found a couple of jobs in my first few weeks that brought in a little extra cash.
However, I am seeing more and more that I'm being seriously underbid on writing and editing work by people who have blatant grammatical errors in their contractor profiles online. The sad part is that the clients obviously don't know anything about grammar, or they'd be doing their writing and editing themselves!
Just because you are creative or have a neat idea for a book does not mean you're a grammatically solid writer. Maybe my new freelance job should be editing the other writers' contractor profiles!
Hmph. That is all for today. Curmudgeon, out.
No comments:
Post a Comment