[kictanet] Declining English grammar in our Newsprint

[Catherine Adeya]

On the contrary Daktari. I am speaking from experience having taught, and then worked, with editing graduates. It is possible to work very very hard on something you are not sure about, or not comfortable with, and get the same result. I do agree that there are some jobs that if you work very hard and with the right attitude and achieve phenomenal results. However, Daktari it is not the same with editing. I have worked with a very studious young editor but he just did not have an eye for copy-editing as hard as he worked. I finally found the best position for him within the company where he wrote the initial articles (he did a great job by the way though mixed his tenses quite a bit& misused punctuation a lot). MJ had passion for what he did combined with hard work. This young man had the same but he just could not 'sing' (edit) like MJ even with a lot of practice. He tried so hard but he could not be the last eye in the editorial process. In the long
 run, everyone was happy. There is room for different levels of editors in the editorial process but we have to be careful in the hiring process to get those with the potential/capacity to fit in this process.
Catherine 



On Tue, 11 Oct 2011 07:08 CEST bitange at jambo.co.ke wrote:

>Catherine,
>I think we are approaching this discussion the wrong way.  If you have been employed to be an Editor, then be the best in the World.  You simply have to take the job seriously.
>
>You need to watch Michael Jackson's "This is it" in order to understand what taking your job seriously mean.  You will begin to understand why he was good.  Similarly, we can have good editors.  The Indians have succeeded in this yet we think we have better grasp of the language.
>
>There are good Editors out there but they are kept out of the job either because they do not know someone or have no money to bribe and get the job.  Do we know how the hiring is done?  For us to succeed we must first accept our inadequacies, our rotten habbits, our biases, our tribalist tendancies, our ...
>
>There is no sabstitute for hard work and transparency.  If we embrace these simple rules, our publications will change over night.  It is time we accept that governance issue for this country does not only affect the Government.  We must get rid of it from our society.
>
>This is the root cause of our bad image in everything we do.
>
>
>Ndemo.
>
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>  
>Sent from my BlackBerry®
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Catherine Adeya <elizaslider at yahoo.com>
>Sender: kictanet-bounces+bitange=jambo.co.ke at lists.kictanet.or.keDate: Mon, 10 Oct 2011 09:02:00 
>To: <bitange at jambo.co.ke>
>Reply-To: Catherine Adeya <elizaslider at yahoo.com>
>Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions<kictanet at lists.kictanet.or.ke>
>Subject: Re: [kictanet] Declining English grammar in our Newsprint
>
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