A couple of weeks ago I received an assignment to rewrite a couple dozen blog articles. I always find it a bit fascinating to read blog articles that I’ve been asked to rewrite. At first, I wonder why it is that they need to be rewritten. I mean, how did they come to be accepted in the first place? As well, opening each article is kind of like opening Christmas presents in some Bizzaro-World. Each one is filled with all kinds of grammatical stocking stuffers.
I need to preface things by letting you folks know that I am not the world’s best writer. Shocking, I know. For the sake of consistency, I always have a typo or two in darn near everything I write.
After completing this last batch of rewrites, I can honestly say that there must be hope for me and my writing career.
Here are a few of the things to which I was exposed:
The comma fetish – There was a writer who felt the need to use, like, commas for well, everything that could, be considered a, pause in speech. The thing is, by getting rid of the commas the prose was tighter and read better to my inner ears. If it was only a matter of style, I may have let them be. As it was, they were a major distraction so I kicked them to the curb.
Sentence fear – Oh-Em-Gee. There were and-mines everywhere. More buts than a booty convention, too. Why this fear of making a new sentence? It’s easy. At the end of a thought, hit the key with the little dot on it, thusly: . Now, spacebar, spacebar then press and hold the “shift” key as you type the first letter of a brand new, shiny sentence. Some of these run ons were so long, they ended up being parasentences or sentengraphs. Or something.
Informal tone – “Hey, Yippy-skippy here. How’d ya like to know about the seven most awesome dog polishers ever invented?” We all know that my tone on Tumblemoose tends to be a bit on the informal side but when I’m writing blog posts for others, I kick things up a bit. I’m not saying the writing needs to be stiff, I’m saying it needs to be a bit more professional.
Of coarse – Not a typo. One writer started about every third sentence with “Of course”. On occasion, in very specific circumstances this phrase may be warranted. Otherwise it comes off as condescending and arrogant. Of course, I could be wrong about this.
Cutesy cute – That simile that it took hours to come up with? Not cute. Not at all. In fact it is often distracting and amateurish. This goes back to one of the hardest things about being a good writer. Stephen King puts it best in On Writing: Kill your darlings. That’s right. That extremely clever quip or simile needs to go away. I’m talking tone and professionalism.
Format or floormat – When writing blog articles for submission to a client, simple is best. 12 point font, Times New Roman, minimal heading formatting, standard bullets and for most clients, submitting in MS Word or Open Office is expected. If you are serious as a freelance writer, suck it up and quit writing your posts in Notepad. .txt and .rtf are so Web 1.0
It was a definite challenge to bring some of the articles back from the edge of death. As with most writing assignments, I learned a great deal about myself and my writing abilities.
What say you? Have you been in the position of rewriting someone else’s work? How did it go?
