This is topic Have you ever had an assignment at work that was so bad that you wanted to die? in forum Books, Films, Food and Culture at Hatrack River Forum.
I have one right now. I'm editing a book by a just-retired communications professor who taught journalism for many years. It's a history of the Communications Department at BYU. You'd think that the writing quality would be at least decent, right?
Wrong.
Here's an example:
quote:Concurrent with the speech classes were the high cost technology of a radio and later a television station to service the entire university community but to serve as a laboratory setting for students majoring in the speech and later broadcast disciplines.
Fifty points for the first person who can tell me just what the freakin' heck that sentence means. And the sad thing is that this is how a great deal of the writing is. It's a murky fog broken only occasionally by moments bordering on lucidity. It's getting so that I can't read normal text anymore; the text-processing center of my brain is just a little fried.
And the biggest problem is that I'm only a hundred pages into a book that's 367 pages long (plus preface).
Shoot me now.
[ October 16, 2003, 03:39 PM: Message edited by: Jon Boy ]
Posted by katharina (Member # 827) on :
Velvet J, that's awful. You have my sympathies.
Only to a point, though. It could be worse. It could be written by an engineer.
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
You poor, poor thing! (((((JB)))))
Ok, I changed my mind. My dream job is no longer technical/scientific editing! Posted by Jon Boy (Member # 4284) on :
Written by an engineer?! Posted by katharina (Member # 827) on :
The scared smilie is turning into my absolute favorite.
Posted by Jon Boy (Member # 4284) on :
Oh, and I forgot to mention the page-long chunks of text from chapter 1 that are appearing virtually word-for-word in chapter 3. What the crap was he doing when he wrote this? It's like I'm reading a loosely organized stack of notes, not a book!
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
{--- loves editing technical writing. If you want to see some doozies written by engineers to feel better let me know.
In fact since I'm the only one around here who can write remotely coherently (I know some of you would dispute the fact that my writing is coherent) I've been thinking of moderating a monthly technical writing roundtable here at work. (I never said I was sane.) I find that most engineers have no clue who their target audience is and once they get a good picture of who they are writing for their writing drastically improves.
AJ
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
Maybe he was participating in NaNoWriMo a la Chris Bridges?
AJ
Posted by Zan (Member # 4888) on :
Excuse me, but many engineers write good.
Posted by Risuena (Member # 2924) on :
We have a couple editors on staff here their current favorite sentence is "This grant will help producers produce products."
Quite profound, I think.
Posted by blacwolve (Member # 2972) on :
My dad is an engineer who also happens to be one of the best writers I know. Unfortuantly, I didn't get those genes.
Posted by Jon Boy (Member # 4284) on :
Editors came up with that sentence, Risuena? An editor should know better!
Edit: This post just goes to show that I can't read anymore.
[ October 16, 2003, 06:47 PM: Message edited by: Jon Boy ]
Posted by screechowl (Member # 2651) on :
That guy wrote all the education books I ever had to read! I wondered where he was from.
You must have done something in a past life to deserve this one.
Posted by littlemissattitude (Member # 4514) on :
Jon Boy...Here's my swing at it. It's a loose translation, and I don't know how close I am to what he meant, but I tried.
"At the same time speech classes were introduced a radio station, and later a television station, were installed on campus. This involved the acquisition of a great deal of expensive technology. The stations were meant to serve the entire university community, but they (also?) served as laboratories for students majoring in speech and, later on, in broadcasting."
Like I said, I don't know if that is faithful to what the writer was trying to say. It is what I took from reading what he wrote - and it took about five or six times through before I got that much. Part of the problem, I think, is that he tried to do about three sentences in one.
Posted by Prince (Member # 5823) on :
Jon Boy... It's Alfe Pratte, isn't it?
Posted by Donny Osmond (Member # 5349) on :
Whoa. How'd you know? Is he that infamous?
littlemissattitude: Actually, that sounds pretty good. That's about the same idea that I was coming up with.
[ October 16, 2003, 10:48 PM: Message edited by: Donny Osmond ]
Posted by Avatar300 (Member # 5108) on :
Me studying be to engineer an and me writing bad not
What me fail english unpossible
Posted by littlemissattitude (Member # 4514) on :
Well, I've tutored English for years, and I've also done a little editing in my time. My best friend is brilliant but severely dyslexic. One of her teachers in community college (who is also dyslexic and so understood her problem) advised her to get an editor - that it wasn't cheating. So, I edited her papers all through a year of community college, two and a half years of upper division work, and a year of teacher's credential work. All of her professors knew that I was doing it (in fact we shared several professors during our upper division days) and knew that I only edited for clarity and never for content, and none of them had a problem with it.
Posted by Pat (Member # 879) on :
I took a few classes from the guy. He's just as bad in the classrom.
Posted by Donny Osmond (Member # 5349) on :
The thing that boggles my mind is that people in the department apparently begged him (as he tells it, anyway) to write this book.
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