Even Award Winning Writers Need Editors
I just reviewed this article titled “Managing the Risk of Employee Blogging” which earned a Burton Award for Legal Writing Excellence.
Here’s the opening paragraph:
“The advent of the weblog, or “blog,” is only the latest advancement in online technology to make the risk manager’s job more difficult. Most people use blogs to post daily content, such as news and commentary, to a website. Many people use their blogs to air their opinions, and inevitably, some of these involve posting negative, harassing, hostile, false or confidential information and opinions about one’s employers and co-workers. This has created a new set of risks for corporate employers who might not be aware of how personal blogging could affect them, much less know what to do about it.”
The first sentence discusses an advancement that makes the risk manager’s job more difficult. The second sentence discusses a different topic — why people ‘use’ blogs. This violates the age-old rule that says a new topic starts a new paragraph.
Consider the third sentence:
Many people use their blogs to air their opinions, and inevitably, some of these involve posting negative, harassing, hostile, false or confidential information and opinions about one’s employers and co-workers.
What does these refer to? People? Blogs? Opinions? Another age-old rule says the relation between a pronoun and its antecedent must be clear and unambiguous.
This just goes to show what professional publishers very well know: every writer needs an editor — even those who win writing awards.
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Want to read an interesting and well-written article that won a Burton Award? Check out “Absurdist Humor and the Form-Substance Dialectic in Tax Law” written by Doug Frazer, an attorney at DeWitt Ross & Stevens.
