Mourning the English language

It’s hard to be an editor in the twenty-first century. The English language is dying a slow, painful death, and no one seems to care. What’s more, thanks to the proliferation of the BPO business model, the deadlines are tight and set on a 24-hour clock.

I work hard for next-to-no pay. When I started, I was okay with that because I was a trainee working in a country with a seriously undervalued currency. And when I became a freelancer, I couldn’t complain much because there were no other job offers coming, and I was living at home. But when you’re living alone and working day and night for dollars and cents, it often feels like it’s not worth the trouble. This feeling is compounded by clients who give you bad feedback, with no explanation of why they’re displeased, after you’ve put all your effort into making their barely intelligible document look like it was written by a native English speaker.

I don’t remember ever having an English grammar lesson in school. I guess I learned to write/speak properly by reading and by applying some of the rules of French grammar to my native language. I honestly don’t know. And I didn’t grow up in the computer age. We wrote everything by hand and got our information from books.

The information that is out there today is scary. The Internet has given absolutely anyone the opportunity to be an “author.” In fact, if you look at people’s profiles and resumes these days, they call themselves “authors” because they blog, or have blogged at some point. By that token, we must all be “subject matter experts” because we have opinions on things. Because all you need today are opinions, not facts. It’s an instant reaction now to google something when you want to know about it. See, Google has become such an important part of our lives that it has become acceptable to use the word as a verb! And the Internet is full of complete nonsense and unchecked information written by people like you and me.

Today, v r spsd 2 wryt lyk dis. It makes me cringe. This “language” first surfaced very innocently in text messages due to the lack of space: How R U? Soon, it developed, killing off vowels, compressing endless phrases into acronyms, negating punctuation marks, and substituting words with symbols or numbers wherever possible, all in order to save us time—not because we’re all so busy, but because we need to write the next text message, and the next, and the next... People actually have lots of time on their hands; they just don’t notice because they’re usually doing more than one thing at a time.

This is the “zero attention span” era, so who really cares about spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentence construction? Sometimes I feel like it’s only me, which makes me as a professional editor kind of redundant.

Failure and success

I’ve always had this problem with failure, or perceived failure, in the sense that criticism gets deep down under my skin and causes me to rethink the path that I’m on. Sometimes, this happens for the better. Many times, I’ve lost my confidence and started something from scratch, only to have its quality exceed what it was before. For example, throughout middle school and secondary school, I was into music. For most of those years, I played the tenor saxophone. I really enjoyed it, and people told me I was good. I thought I was good, too. And then, my high school music teacher brought in some musicians to give us some pointers, and they butchered my playing: your embouchure isn’t right, and your phrasing needs a lot of work, etc. Don’t get me wrong; I’m fine with constructive criticism—when you’ve been bullied as much as I have, you develop a thick skin—but this experience had left so strong a mark on me that when I sat down to play the next morning, I couldn’t do it. It was like all the things these people had pointed out, which no one had ever pointed out before, were suddenly manifesting in a vastly exaggerated way. I was like a newbie learning to play the saxophone for the first time.

Not surprisingly, this didn’t go over well. I still remember when Mrs. Quinn was conducting our combined classes; the look on her face when my horrid notes squeaked out over everyone else was one of disgust and disbelief. And then there was my jazz band conductor, who asked me, “What happened to you?” Embarrassed does not describe how I felt. I was mortified, and I was also frustrated because I didn’t know why I was playing so badly. But after a lot of practicing, not only did I escape this abhorrent playing, but I became more skilled than I had been before the core-shaking incident.

I think something similar happened to me with my writing. All I wanted to do in life was to be a writer. And between 2003 and 2005, I tried to make that happen professionally. Well, it didn’t. I wrote articles that were never published, a novel that received many rejection letters from publishers, and applied for countless jobs for which I was never even interviewed. I couldn’t get a literary agent to take me on either. And then I got a job offer in India, in copy editing. I thought back to my school days, when my friends would ask me to look over their French assignments, and I’d happily sit with my red pen and correct their work. Yes, I thought, this is the place for me. I had some hiccups along the way as an editor as well, with some bad client feedback and low quality assessment scores; nevertheless, I decided, no, I’m not meant to write; I’m meant to edit other people’s writing. But now that I’ve been doing this for five years, I’ve honed my skills, and I’ve read hundreds of really bad authors (sorry, but it’s true), I think I’m over my mental block about writing.

So, I think this “problem” of mine is both a good thing and a bad thing. It might keep me down for some time, but I always persevere and rise again, to the top of the heap. (Never let anyone tell you it's wrong to toot your own horn!)