by Harpreet Bhagrath | Apr 15, 2012 | Fussy Editor
Mr Agarwal,
In your TJ article, the following sentence was chopped, as it talked of telecommuting figures, a bit of a diversion from the focus (telecommuting is working from home, and our article is about full-time employees occasionally doing office work out of office premises):
According to Forrester research, more than 34 million Americans are occasional telecommuters, and the number is likely to increase to 63 million by 2016.
We don’t require graphs to be indented. As a matter of house style, we capitalise Web, and write website as website. For the time being, any article you do for TJ does not require photo caption and box; Brisvaani articles do for sure.
Kindly provide blurbs in all the forthcoming articles. One of the tutorials sent earlier talks about writing blurb for CM articles and features. You can note how the blurb (text immediately after the title) has been provided in both your articles above. Also note both the titles and write similar titles for your future copies.
Harpreet Bhagrath
by Harpreet Bhagrath | Apr 10, 2012 | Fussy Editor
Hi Mr Motwani,
Your multitasking article has been published, but there were a few issues we need to discuss, so that they don’t recur.
Headline has been changed from “Multitasking Messes Up Your Life” to “Why Multitasking is a Bad Idea”. Kindly see why.
Also see how the mistakes below are elementary; you could just as easily have spotted — and fixed — them yourself, if only you had edited your work before submitting.
<strong>2. Multitasking Is Not a Time-Saver</strong>
It is common belief that multitasking saves time, or at least we can at least pack a load of work into a period of time. However, experts say it is an illusion. The NYT quotes a study: “In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment websites. I was surprised by how easily people were distracted and how long it took them to get back to the task,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft research scientist and co-author, with Shamsi Iqbal of the University of Illinois. If it’s this bad at Microsoft,” Mr. Horvitz added, “it has to be bad at other companies, too.”
Kindly be sure when you tell the readers where the quotes start and where they end. In the graph above, the quote cannot be starting at “In a recent study…”. It, instead, should have started at “I was surprised…”, where it is not starting, according to you.
Mr Motwani, the point is we should not be discussing these elementary things. All our writers double up as sub-editors when they submit their copies; the copy should be in publishable condition.
There were other issues in the rest of the piece. We have fixed the mistakes this time, but it will not be possible for us to put in so many efforts into your articles in future, I’m afraid.
Otherwise, it was a good read. So I would say keep up the good work, but cut down on the elementary mistakes.
Harpreet Bhagrath
by Harpreet Bhagrath | Apr 2, 2012 | Fussy Editor
Hi Mr Agarwal,
Your harassment policy article has been published.
A lot has been changed again, and it took me at least half an hour on this article again. Kindly see what has been changed and why.
Tag words were missing in the Create Content page. The photo was missing too. Serial comma is still missing in series of items.
The other article on preventing sexual harassment is still pending for the following reasons.
You need to create content again; this time through “Feature Article” and not “News”, which you seem to have done.
These two sub-heads need more work again: <strong>4.Workplace Supervision</strong> and <strong>3.Channels for Filing Complaints</strong> Just see if you can add some more information or quotes or expert views in these sub-heads.
You’d need to work on the blurb as well.
Don’t lull yourself that sexual harassment doesn’t happen at your place. Be prepared with a policy…
“Don’t lull yourself into believing that…” will be more like it. Plus, kindly don’t mention policy, as the article, unlike the one before, is not about framing a policy but about taking measures for ‘preventing’ sexual harassment.
Also, kindly writer better image captions for your articles. I know you can write way better captions than this: Sexual harassment happens all the time.
The article needs a photo and tag words.
It needs a box too; the links you gave have already been used in the previous article. We can still provide the links again in the box as they will be useful to the readers, but kindly see if you can put in the efforts required to ideate on and write another box.
There were formatting issues too in this article.
Harpreet Bhagrath
by Harpreet Bhagrath | Apr 2, 2012 | Fussy Editor
Mr Motwani,
I have attached the edited file (with Track Changes on) for your perusal. There were a few mistakes there, including typos. Besides the obvious mistakes, a few other parts have been changed; not because they were mistakes but because I was trying to improve the article a little. Kindly note the changes, and if you like, we can discuss them.
You wrote: As somebody said, a 2005 hurricane in South Florida left everything in its path “blowing in the wind.”
Mr Motwani, kindly don’t attribute certain quotes or fragments of quotes to unnamed/unidentified speakers. It’s better to ignore such a piece of information than attribute it to “somebody”, unless we can provide some more information on this speaker, like “As an Alabama resident who was… said”. Something, in the absence of a name, to give our readers to imagine that speaker in some way.
Also, you need to provide a fitting image and a caption to match in your forthcoming articles.
We use title case in our features’ headings and sub-headings. In news we stick to sentence case. Also, we use serial comma (Oxford comma) as a matter of house style.
You would also need to think of fitting headings for your future articles.
These two were clean copies, but I hope they are cleaner in future.
Harpreet Bhagrath
by Harpreet Bhagrath | Mar 23, 2012 | Fussy Editor
Mr Agarwal,
A few things were missing in your article on cloud computing.
We use title case in headings and sub-headings in our articles and features.
Second, you needed to make sub-heads bold as you do in our news.
Then, our ‘sub-headed’ parts are at least two graphs long. Your sub-heads hardly contained any details or further exploring.
The sub-headed parts, like the following three, could have been improved with an apt quote, some clarification, some analysis, etc., just to give them some ‘body’:
<strong>No Capital Expenditures</strong>
The costs of cloud computing are operational rather than capital. Since the IT infrastructure needs are handled by a third-party, the costs shift from capital to operational.
<strong>Low Cost of Entry</strong>
With its reach and access, cloud computing is the best option for any startup. You can test your idea very quickly or scale a division of your company to the world at low cost.
<strong>Bandwidth</strong>
If you require huge storage space, then it is better to buy that yourself rather than pay someone else for it.
Plus, we also need at least three quotes from experts or news makers. Your article fell short here.
Otherwise the article was a good read, but I feel it could have been a lot better.
I have published the article, but kindly make sure these issues are addressed in your forthcoming articles. Here’s the URL:
http://www.scivista.com/content/20110504/what%E2%80%99s-right-and-wrong-cloud-computing-7812674.html
Harpreet Bhagrath
by Harpreet Bhagrath | Feb 28, 2012 | Fussy Editor
Hi, Ankita
This is yet another time when I feel that your editing has ended up making the news even worse.
The lead in this news from Rahul was edited for one issue, but you ended up leaving out a crucial fact — which Rahul had duly provided, mind you — that was required for the readers’ understanding.
http://themoneytimes.com/featured/20110711/cameron-under-pressure-delay-news-corp-bskyb-deal-id-101701710742.html
This is what Rahul had written:
News Corp.’s troubles don’t seem like ending since allegations that its top selling weekly newspaper allegedly supported the voicemail-hacking of a 13-year-old kidnapped girl Milly Dowler.
Amid all the contentions, political pressure is escalating on British Prime Minister David Cameron to delay the approval of News Corp’s acquisition of British Sky Broadcasting Group PLC until Dowler’s phone-hacking case is solved by the British police.
Ed Miliband, the leader of opposition is reportedly seeking parliamentary vote this week if Cameron fails to handle the issue.
This is what you changed the whole part to:
News Corp.’s troubles don’t seem to be ending any time soon.
After the allegations that its top selling weekly newspaper supported the voicemail-hacking of a 13-year-old kidnapped girl Milly Dowler in 2002, Ed Miliband, the leader of opposition, is reportedly seeking parliamentary vote this week if British Prime Minister David Cameron fails to handle the issue.
Meanwhile, News Corp. has terminated its best-selling Sunday tabloid ‘News of the World’, which was the nucleus of the phone-hacking allegations. Its last edition came out Sunday.
We needed to tell the readers what was Miliband seeking parliamentary permission on — which Rahul had duly provided but you omitted. This fact comes way down in your edit, but by the time the reader gets there, the damage will have been done. Till then, the reader will stay confused about which issue does the PM fail to handle. Rather than leading the reader through to the meaning, we have confused him in the beginning itself by withholding one crucial bit of information.
To reiterate, this is the crucial part that was omitted by you, to the detriment of the piece’s readability:
…political pressure is escalating on British Prime Minister David Cameron to delay the approval of News Corp’s acquisition of British Sky Broadcasting Group PLC until Dowler’s phone-hacking case is solved by the British police.
The issue before PM is the delaying of the News Corp’s acquisition of another company. But your edit appears to give the mistaken impression that PM has to deal with the girl’s voicemail hacking. Will the lofty British PM handle a small-time hacking issue?
Though Rahul’s lead was reading awkward, and sure needed an edit, we ended up making it worse. In future, kindly edit closely for clarity.
I have put it all in writing, rather than talking to you in person, so that you can closely review where you went wrong. We’ll discuss this once you have time for this.
