On being an Editor…

            Being an editor is a job from hell. Little did I know, when I volunteered to be an editor of Art in Town — the faculty’s wall magazine— that my perspective towards editors and their job would change forever. As a writer, I always saw editors as the people with a genetic disposition to irrational grouchiness and fickleness, however; after two months of editing, I have seen the light. From now on, the moment an editor sends me a note, I will put my writer’s ego on the side and try to see it his way. The reasons? The mere thought of explaining this, makes me hum Andy William’s “Where do I begin?”

            For starters, writers do not stick to deadlines by nature, so how about Jordanian writers, and not only any Jordanian writers… students. Students are designed to miss deadlines, and tend to think the world revolves around them. They think they could submit their articles two hours before the issue is on print queue. But why of course! Editors are supermen who can edit your piece, format it, and print it in a jiffy. Not to mention, that as an editor, I had to get in touch with my aggressive Mafioso side and send daily reminders to the writers. One of the writers actually asked me to edit her piece and put it up, two days after it out, which is absolutely unacceptable, not to mention impossible because of the time restrictions—which brings me to the process of editing.

            Editing the articles sent to my inbox is like searching for a needle in a haystack. The format is never consistent: some paste into the body of the email, others send in attachments. Material pasted into the body is basically a huge dump of unformatted text that on first sight looks like spam. The writers try to be creative by using a larger font, or a fuchsia color to highlight certain parts. To think that attached documents would be any better is indeed a grave mistake, since they are anything but professional. Bizarre fonts, colors, and unnecessary underlining seem to be the common plague of all these documents, not to mention they assume that I will figure out how to indent the chunks of incoherent information and make it a publishable article. We can not blame the incoherency of such articles on the poor structure, since grammar and punctuation errors could make a new Webster of their own.

            Grammar is definitely not of the student’s strongest assets. You’d think that using a word processor would help them pinpoint the horrible grammar, well, think again. I come across sentences without auxiliaries, correct tenses, or articles for that matter, example:

I went to store there was no eggs, I mad.

            I mad, indeed. “Are you really studying English in this department, or did they sign you up for Italian instead?” I ask myself, imagining the student being chopped into pieces as I repair the damage. Another problem seems to be punctuation, since none of the sentences in their articles actually end. I pity anyone who plans to read them out loud, since they will suffocate before hearing the claps. I had a one page submission that had exactly three sentences: three run-on sentences that could not be stopped by the wind or the green lines under them for that matter. It seems it is not only a grammar/punctuation problem; it is also a common sense dilemma.

        “Why are there green lines under your sentences?” I asked one of the contributors bluntly. “Decoration? Press F7 next time.”

            Another problem related to visual difficulties is spelling. You’d think that having red lines all over the document would alert the writers to spelling mistakes? I loved how one writer insisted all throughout the article that we are human “bieings”. No, this is impossible. It must be something greater than common sense, or basic computer skills. I still can not pinpoint the problem here, nor can those writers.

            When critiqued, the students get quite defensive, and often accuse me of being too “picky”. They refuse to acknowledge that they are just not up to par, or that they need to work on their language. Some of them are actually offended and take my comments as an insult. Yes, I’m on a private vendetta to insult you through editing— that is the exact purpose of me volunteering to edit.

            To be fair, editing may not be a job from hell, but it is definitely when dealing with Jordanian student writers. I took this position to hone my editing skills, since I could use developing an eye for errors, however; this is turning into a panoramic experience of the horrors of the linguistic malnutrition suffered by the students of the English Department at the University of Jordan.