Thursday, June 07, 2007

Wall Street Journal, Day 9: Two Down, Eight to Go

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - Another week down, eight more weeks to go.

Apparently I've forgotten basic grammar things like pronoun-antecedent agreement and parallel construction. Here's an example of the latter, in a brief about Korean Air Lines planning to launch a low-cost carrier in a couple of years:
Korean Air's low-cost carrier will operate domestic routes and short- and mid-haul international routes using a Boeing 737 fleet, it said.
What's wrong with that sentence? Stupid me, I actually didn't catch this until Tim---the guy who's been looking over my editing jobs this past week and giving me input---pointed it out to me. It's not clear what the "it" in "it said" is referring to---the carrier or Korean Air. It looks like it's referring to the nearest thing to "it," the carrier. But obviously that's not what the writer intends to say in the sentence.

Isn't that dumb that I didn't catch something like that?

Guess it's a good thing, though, that I'm making these mistakes early on and having someone catch them for me, so I can know to shield myself against making those same mistakes again. As Tim said to me today, "This isn't really a hard job, except that you have to be perfect every day." Oh the pressure!

Still, it was nice to see Tim come over to me with yesterday's batch of edited articles and tell me that he didn't see the same mistakes in the new batch. It's all about learning curve (or is it "the learning curve"?).

I think I'll leave this entry at that and perhaps come back tomorrow with more.

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