november 18, 2007Dear Editors and Proofreaders at Linux Journal,
I find your magazine informative and fun to read at times. But, recently, your magazine has made me grind my teeth because of the horrible editing. Editing an article does not mean running it through a spell-checker and giving it a thumbs up. Editing an article means going through the article and fixing issues such as repetition or removing words that are not necessary. As a print magazine, you are held up to higher standards than blogs (though, bloggers need to also edit their stuff). I am considering not renewing my subscription because it is difficult to read a badly edited magazine.
Let me give you some examples of what should have been edited from two articles in the November 2007 issue:
- From Distributed Compiling With distcc (page 60): "Even with a core 2 duo...With another pair of core duo..." The words "Core" and "Duo" are proper names for a product by Intel and they should be capitalized.
- Jon Hall's opinion piece, Navigating by the Sun (page 34), opens with six completely useless paragraphs about dead reckoning and John Harrison, which has little or nothing to do with the actual opinion piece.
- From Red Hat Enterprise Linux Cluster Suite (starting on page 46). This was an article that needed a lot of editing because the author tried to write as dense as he could in order to try to look smart.
- "Organizations, regardless of whether they are serving external customers or internal customers, are deploying highly available solutions to make their applications highly available." First, if it is regardless when talking about serving external or internal customers, then we can clarify by removing that phrase. Second, customers deploy "highly available solutions to make their applications highly available": Duh. This sentence would have been more clear: "Organizations are deploying highly available solutions." Six words versus twenty-three.
- (Page 51): "Next, I will explain, in simple steps, how to use an already-configured RHEL cluster to provide high availability to a MySQL database server, which is, no doubt, one of the most commonly used databases on RHEL." How the hell does something as convoluted and wordy as this get by an editor? Clearer version: "I will now explain how to provide high availability to a MySQL database server using a RHEL cluster." The original sentence is too wordy. "in simple steps" Why? Would someone want to explain something "in difficult steps"? "one of the most commonly used databases on RHEL", great, thanks for the statistic. "which is, no doubt", so, the statistic was not really a statistic, but your guess which you have no doubt in? Eighteen words versus thirty-seven (HALF!).
- (Page 51): "Now, you simply need to define a failover domain using the cluster configuration tool (with the cluster node of your choice having a higher priority). This failover domain will have the MySQL service, which, in turn, will have two private resources and one shared resource (the service IP address)." Ugh! Better and clearer: "Define a failover domain using the cluster configuration tool and give the cluster node of your choice a higher priority. This failover domain will have two private resources and one shared resource, the service IP address." Thirty-six words versus forty-nine.
I could go on and on. But, the most ironic thing is that Doc Searls, a Senior Editor at the magazine, writes about Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. Maybe the editors at Linux Journal can read The Elements of Style and put it to good use. Currently, the magazine is feeling like a pass-through for articles submitted -- the articles come in, they are run through spell-check, and then they are printed. That is not how it should be.
Thanks for listening,
Mookie
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