Nightmares of a Dream Job (2/12/05)

I lived in constant fear of being promoted. I immediately knew that something was strange about the small publishing company, but I ignored my instincts in favor of landing a salaried job that combined my two main interests– music and journalism. I’m a classically trained musician with a knack for writing, but the fact that I was grossly under qualified to work as a magazine editor was irrelevant; it didn’t take long to figure out why.

While I don’t know as much about grammar as I probably should, my on-the-job training only made matters worse. The publisher was very particular and his editing criteria were peculiar, to say the least. Pronouns were all but forbidden, which made interviews especially difficult. The awkward sentences in the finished drafts were so different from the original transcriptions, I was shocked that the interviewees ever consented to publication. Starting a sentence with a gerund was grounds for termination, and the commas I mistakenly placed after prepositional phrases had a mysterious way of vanishing in the final edits.

I overcame an annoying habit of using topic sentences. Introducing a new topic was "needlessly stupid"; instead we used run-on sentences to segue from one idea to the next. Other errors included hyphenating compound adjectives, while failing to place a hyphen between an adverb and the word it modified (one twelve page article was heavily-laden with these.) When I challenged this assertion and told the publisher that compound adjectives should be hyphenated, he cited example after unhyphenated example (of adverbial clauses) from Strunk and White to prove his point.

I spent two frustrating production cycles re-editing every article I was assigned, because I had started several sentences with the "wrong" subject. When I finally figured out that the publisher was rejecting the use of past and present participles, not subject order, I cringed, realizing the only option I had left was to write in passive voice.

Articles frequently came back with circles around "forbidden words". I kept a list of words the publisher arbitrarily decided to abhor, with "achieve", "help", and "goal" being the most common offenders. "Reveal" once prompted him to scrawl the words SPARE ME FOREVER nastily in the margin. It’s funny, really, this forbidden word list. "Good" was listed seven times as the suggested replacement for words from "adequate" to "ingenious", and "because of" always replaced "due to," regardless of grammatical implication.

I wouldn’t have minded adhering to such bizarre editorial guidelines if I hadn’t been blamed for the dull prose that inevitably resulted. I know how to write in a conversational style-- I just wasn't allowed to do so. I wasn't even allowed to use the word "allow"-- it was on the list.

The constant criticism and lengthy commute quickly became unbearable; as soon as I saved up enough money to live off of while I found another job, I fled. It’ll take some time to fully recover from this experience; although my writing style is still on the mend, I thankfully managed to escape with my grammatical integrity intact.


[This is for all you fellow word nerds out there....]