Good editors have a process before publication to weed out obvious weak or unacceptable submissions. They usually send you back a corrected draft for your approval.
Certainly, there are after publication critiques, battles, corrections and withdrawals. However, obvious pieces like this should be caught beforehand.
Wonder if this was solicited or sent in? No idea how those articles work.
suddenly imagining a Justice League sort of publication where different heroes from various storylines converge on a single platform to create a super-publication of actual information to defeat the forces of floppy-holstered Taurus-slingersOriginally Posted by Lex Luthier
I would work for her in a hot minute, but the danger there is when you have a lot of respect for someone, you also want to try to prevent them from making massive hiring mistakes...so just a fundamental conflict of interest taking place there, really.
From today's headlines...
"Tam Hires Misanthropist"
Feminists cheer while ACLU looks into allegation. Story and images on page 8...
There's nothing civil about this war.
It's called "pistol-forum.com"
Okay, "suddenly imagining a version of pistol-forum where I either get paid, have a sweet super-vehicle like a batmobile or something, or at the very least get a wardrobe budget for costumes."
The costumes part may relate to the ACLU involvement, not sure yet exactly.
In the not so old days when gun magazines came out once a month they were run by people who had some knowledge of the subject area. Now with online publications there is a constant demand for new content to keep the readers checking back more frequently. I get a feeling that some of the people they have as editors don't have much depth of knowledge.
I don't know if the article on shotguns was solicited or her initiative. I found a bunch of the author's firearms articles on America's first freedom. After reading them, I am going to hazard to guess that she chose the subjects proposed them then submitted them.
She has written a bunch of short articles for NRA's America's First Freedom online edition over the last year. From the information that I have been able to gather about her online, she seems to have taken an NRA basic pistol course and does a tad of shooting. I looked at some of her other articles and found some issues, some worse than others, but nothing of the magnitude as with the shotgun article. In this case she had no idea what she was writing about, and managed to harness just about every wrong cliche' about the shotgun. it is seems apparent that she often harvests incorrect information that is far beyond her base of knowledge and then compiles and summarizes it into her articles.
Last edited by Ed L; 12-06-2019 at 12:35 AM.
I don't know how the NRA does it but the last few issues of Calibre I worked on, we used a technical editor who knew nothing about guns at all; she was a phd in English and ran an editing business. In my case it wasn't a huge challenge because I could understand the changes she wanted, and explain why sometimes things that sounded strange were actually correct as originally written. I can't remember a specific example but it would be things like a phrase I'd written as "later, the .45 was abandoned by the unit" and I would see the "corrected" version and it would look something like this: "later, the 45 _____ (45 of what? this was never explained, and is the specific number of things important here?) were abandoned (is abandoned the right word here? were all 45 of them abandoned or were some kept? Not following this) by the unit's inventory clerk."
And I would have to go back and explain that a .45 was a cartridge. But then later it would just generate another round of corrections and explanations when I'd refer to a Thompson as a big .45 and she would be confused again. (I thought this was a cartridge? But here you have it as a gun, and earlier you said they bored a barrel to fit the .45 bullet but elsewhere you distinguished between a bullet and a cartridge?)
Her technical command of the language was really amazing but it honestly took the fun out of writing. Every easter egg I would throw in for readers who used to enjoy my weird sense of humour would get edited out. I didn't disagree with her choices; in fact I thought she consistently improved the writing across the board. But it wasn't fun anymore because I couldn't just joke around. I would have to explain at length why I thought it was worth including the fact that the Thompson, having been deployed in Shanghai, had fallen victim to one of the classic blunders. And jokes are never fun after you've had to explain them.
Anyway the point is that we also used an editor, other than me, who would send back corrected versions, with no knowledge of the subject matter at all. At that point I stopped reading anyone else's stuff so I have no idea what made it into print.
But based on some of the pieces people submitted to me, I am sure lots of writers wouldn't do a good job of clarifying anything and so even a carefully edited piece might only be grammatically correct, not factually correct.
So between that and the desire lots of people seem to have to be writers without knowing anything about what they're writing, it's a recipe for disaster IMO.
Well played, you win the internet today!
In that case, an NRA job is clearly your gig.
”But in the end all of these ideas just manufacture new criminals when the problem isn't a lack of criminals.” -JRB
A Trooper and I dealt with one just a few months ago that was trying to wander onto a highway. A game warden came by and dispatched it. I think my Benelli would've been more decisive that the .22 that was used.
"It's surprising how often you start wondering just how featureless a desert some people's inner landscapes must be."
-Maple Syrup Actual
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