Dear Ladies-
 
I do an awful lot of writing, sometimes my excellent editor Marylou even
sends me a CHECK for part of my meager efforts!  I really like that part
of the creative process.  With writing, comes (sigh) editing.
 
Anyway, I read Phyllis' post the other day, and I came to The Bad
Sentence.  I read it once, I read it twice, I looked at it again, and
considered the context.  I thought "Nope, she'd kick herself if she
could see that one." and moved on.
 
Here it is, and no, I don't for a moment believe she saw the problem.
 
>If ever there was a guardian angel out there for ferrets that have no
>future, except for life in a shelter or worse, Rose is that guardian
>angel.
 
Lets edit it.  That was NOT the author's intent, that was a badly written
sentence.  We could split it up into two slightly different sentences so
that 'shelter' doesn't get lumped in with 'worse', or we could just clip
the contradictory part right out.
 
"If ever there was a guardian angel out there for ferrets that have no
secure future, Rose is that guardian angel."
 
There.  A good editor would have caught that and seen to it that it got
fixed.  It was a bad sentence, it doesn't make the author a bad person.
 
It is way too easy to write something and not really 'hear' the finished
product.  Sometimes it seems that e-mail communication is e-mail failure
to communicate.  It happens so fast.  If Phyllis had had overnight to
look at that post I can almost guarantee that she would have found the
problem and fixed it herself, but e-mail is just electrons, as fast as
we can type, and we post as fast as we can type, warts and all.
 
Not everybody is lucky enough to have their own personal editor, so let's
cut one another a little slack, shall we?
 
Alexandra in MA
[Posted in FML issue 4489]