Tuesday, April 19, 2011

The Editing Room

Writing can be a beast a lot of the time. It’s so relaxing and helpful when I write for myself. And since I’m highly critical of my own work, I tend to sport the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde outfit without any assistance from the outside world. But when I have to write for others it takes on a decidedly different spin.

Whenever I write for work it’s anxiety producing because I’ve been through the ringer on so many occasions. Business writing is so different from what I’ve written academically and for pleasure. It’s supposed to be concise and straightforward. Although I completely understand this difference, there are times when I struggle because those parameters are limiting and they create loopholes. So you need to be detailed to avoid potential issues. Therein lies the rub, how can you be detailed and concise at the same time? It’s very tricky. I am definitely not a master at this whatsoever.

What drives me crazy is how no one in the business world wants to write and yet, they love to edit. They are brutal with it too. I find it unfair. Just the other day I wrote a procedure that I sent around to a bunch of people to see what they thought. They all thought it was very good. I should have been proud of my work. However, I wasn’t because I knew the real audience was going to chew the draft up and spit it out with me suspended in the spit wad.

One person actually had the nerve to say “Fix this and I’ll help you edit it. It’s so easy to edit and so hard to write.” I wanted to smack the person and say to them…’why don’t you give writing a chance and then you might not be so harsh with your criticism?’ (Some of which were valid but still tame it down!). And no matter how many times people tell me not to take the criticism personally, it’s unavoidable. As someone who enjoys writing (I won’t say I’m a writer!), most of what I write is about how I feel, what I see and my comments on those things. It’s about me and it’s personal. Granted in the work world, it isn’t that way at all. The purpose of the writing is to give information, instruction and on a very rare occasion, an opinion. But it’s still annoying to have to sit there and get your work edited when people don’t have the slightest sense of how hard it is to write nor how individual it is.

Time to put on my hard shell now so that I can chip away at my next work writing task.

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