editing and tea...

[deird1]

I’ve become increasingly familiar with the different styles of editing that you need for different occasions – depending on why the writer in question needs an editor.

For instance:

The most important thing think about when you making a cup of the tea is flavour and strength. Flavour of tea, such as Earl Grey or English Breakfast, should chosen to suit the occasions.

Diagnosis: You’re a reasonable writer, but it’s possible that English is not your first language. You need a picky editor with a book on grammar close at hand.

You need to think about milk. It should go in before the hot water does.
Some people use plastic cups, or polystyrene, but it’s better to use a mug.
Once you’ve made a cuppa, settle down in your favourite chair with a book and a muffin.
If you put the milk in afterwards, it’s easier to see how milkier it will get.
Use tea leaves instead of teabags.
Putting milk in first will stop it from scalding.

Diagnosis: You write things down in the order they occur to you, rather than a logical reading order. You need a creative editor with a handy pair of scissors.

Tee is a grate drink for settling thee nervous. Originally form china, its spread awl over the world and is know drunk buy millions of people everyday.

Diagnosis: You are relying far too much on spellcheck. You need an editor with a large vocabulary and vast realms of patience.

When given the opportunity to commence making a cup of tea, it is important to consider several different requirements, addressing each in turn to ensure a decision-making process that encompasses all of these, putting equal emphasis onto every point that requires it. The first is to address whether to decide to make use of teabags, or to decide to invest in a range of potential options of various tea leaf varieties.

Diagnosis: You have spent too much time writing for the government. You need to be hit over the head with a large mallet.

Comments

[pthalo]

A lot of editing I do is for non native speakers of English. One thing that I find fun -- which doesn't come as often as I'd like because most anyone I'd be editing for is a native speaker of Hungarian and I know that -- is to try to guess their native language by the types of errors they make.

Hungarian is a topic-comment language (like ASL), in which you usually start a sentence with some old bit of information and then you add the new information at the end. And so in ordinary speech you either say "As for John, he likes apples" or "As for apples, John likes them" or "As for liking things, don't get John started about apples." You can just say John likes apples, but usually you're stressing some part of it: we've been talking about John and the new thing I want to add about him is that he likes Apples. Or we've been talking about apples and the new thing I want to add about apples is that John likes them.

Hungarians who learn English discover that English has a method of doing this: As for John, he likes apples. But they don't really appreciate how marked a structure this is in English, how rarely we use this structure, that a native speaker of English would be more likely to say: John likes apples, or John likes apples, or John likes apples. As such, when you read through something a Hungarian has written, you'll see this fronting frequently, almost in every sentence. I'll try to translate your example about tea into Hunglish for you:

The flavour and the strength are the most important aspects of the making a cup of tea. As for the flavour of the tea, such as the Earl Grey or the English Breakfast, it is according to the situation that we are choosing it.

Some people use the plastic glasses, or polystyrene, but the mug is the best for the drinking of tea. To prevent the milk going to sleep, we put in before the hot water, but if we put it in after it will to make it easier to see how milky it will get. Use the loose tea instead of the teabags. The tea has a good effect for calming the nerves. Once the tea is ready, sit down into your favourite chair with a book and a muffin.

As for the origins of the tea, it was originally made in China, but it was spreading all over the world and millions of people are drinking it everyday.