Polishing Before Publishing
I just stumbled upon this article that was published in the Oakland Business Review. It’s a pretty good article, but it’s also a good example of a basic rule in publishing: writers (even if they’re attorneys) need to have their articles reviewed before they’re published, else they run a risk.
Here’s the intro:
It comes as no surprise to business owners that the true success of a company is in large part due to its employees. That’s why recruiting and retaining the best talent is so important.
An editor would have revised the first sentence (. . . is due, in large part, to . . . ) and fixed that singular/plural disagreement in the second sentence.
Here’s the next paragraph:
In the fields of IT, healthcare and engineering, the ongoing need for qualified individuals have led many companies to recruit talent from abroad, as well as among foreign nationals living in the United States.
An editor would have fixed that singular/plural disagreement and revised the dependent clause at the end of the sentence ( . . . companies to recruit foreign nationals.).
Here’s the next paragraph:
Recruiting this talent has proved a challenge in recent years, due to new regulations from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. In fiscal year 2004, the USCIS reduced the number of H-1B visas for foreign nationals from 195,000 per year to just 65,000 annually.
What would an editor do with this paragraph? Why, he’d cut a few words from it (for foreign nationals) because they’re so far from necessary (i.e., foreigners are the only people eligible for these visas). And he’d pound per year and annually into shape, perhaps like this:
In 2004, the USCIS reduced the number of H-1B visas issued each year from 195,000 to 65,000.
Let’s consider just one more change an editor would make (for the sake of making the author look good):
But now Michigan employers who act quickly can take advantage of the 20,000
H-1B visas, which have just been released by the USCIS.
There’s an error in punctuation (an erroneous comma), and an error in grammar (the wrong pronoun). Here’s how it would look after being touched by an editor:
But now Michigan employers who act quickly can take advantage of the 20,000
H-1B visas that have just been released by the USCIS.
____________
Small changes they are, but important. Prospective clients are leary leery of relying on attorneys that who don’t review their own work or have someone else do it for them.
Attorneys who don’t have their articles reviewed before publication run the risk that those articles will drive prospective clients (or future employers) away, rather than draw them near. People could be left thinking that the attorney doesn’t apply due diligence to his legal work, since he doesn’t apply it to his other (and much more visible) work.
