Notebook and Pencil, by Terry Freedman
If the publication doesn’t seem right for you, don’t write for it. Photo by Terry Freedman
It’s very important to study any publication you’re thinking of writing for, or whose editor has approached you. Not just for the obvious reasons, such as checking what kind of topics it covers, whether or not it has recently featured an article along the lines you had in mind, and what sort of terms are being offered or are likely to be offered.
Also important, at least in my opinion, is the quality of the articles and how well they’ve been edited. If poorly written articles are featured, or they are badly edited (or both), I have two concerns about the way it may affect me.
First, if several articles are poorly written, I worry that I may be judged by the company I keep. I realise that this probably comes across as terribly snobbish, but the thing is this. I take my writing very seriously. I invest) quite a lot of time and money in order to keep on top of my game.
My writing may not win me a Nobel prize, but I do at least try to get the basics right. For example, if I use the word “continuous”, I mean continuous, not continual. If I write that someone is disinterested, I mean disinterested, not uninterested. Unfortunately, it’s clear that some people who manage to get articles published do not know the differences between such easily confused words. I’m not a paragon of virtue: I can never remember whether it’s “complimentary” or “complementary” — so I look it up. It’s not that difficult.
Or sometimes the writing is bad in another way. For example, sentences may be so convoluted that it’s hard to wrk out what exactly the writer is saying.
Sometimes, the article is well-written, but is complete rubbish. For instance, it may be factually incorrect, or espousing now-discredited theories.
If you’re a decent wordsmith and you have a piece published in a magazine featuring articles such as the ones I’ve described, will people think yours shines out like a diamond? Or will they think that you have been able to be published only because the editorial standards of the magazine are so low?
My second concern is that, if articles have been badly edited, or not edited at all, my article will end up looking poorly written because of a mistake I’ve made. Once, for example, I wrote in an article, “Although I had only just started to study economics, I was already beginning to think like one.”
I fired it off to the editor and then, on my umpteenth reading, realised I’d meant to say “… think like an economist”. I emailed the editor with the correction — but she had already spotted my error and corrected it. That’s one of the things a good editor will do: save you from your own incompetence!
A really good editor will sometimes suggest an alternative way of putting something. In my experience, such alternatives are almost invariably better than my original sentence.