"All editors are failed authors." - Samuel Johnson "Every editor should have a pimp for a brother, so he can have someone to look up to." - H.L. Mencken
You may have gotten the impression from what I wrote earlier that I have somewhat of a 'tude about editors. That is only partially true. I do have respect for some editors I have met, I have none for those who got into the business because they were closet control freaks who wanted to hide their lack of creativity by being able to "correct" creative people. What makes me worth my not inconsiderable fees as a tech writer is that I care enough about what I do that my stuff doesn't need editing. In the company I've contracted to for the last six years, we didn't have the staff for full-time editors, so we tech writers were expected to do it on our own, or resort to "peer-editing." Now that the company has been acquired by IBM, it's theo- retically a different story. They have a whole team of editors, whose job it is to "pass muster" on any manual before it is released. I now hold the distinction of being the only tech writer from ILOG whose manuals can be released without editorial approval. This is because when ILOG was acquired they took a repre- sentative manual from each writer and sent it through the editorial process. In mine, they found only one thing to complain about -- I had not followed their convention of showing Windows drive letters in lowercase. That is, they wanted me to write pathnames as c:\ILOG\ODME\Developer\... and I wrote them C:\ILOG\ODME\Developer\... When they brought this to my attention, I pointed out that their convention violated all industry standards, *and* Microsoft's own Style Guide. As a result, IBM changed its standard. A small victory for writers over editors, but a satisfying one. :-) [http://www.savagechickens.com/images/chickeneditor.jpg]
