What Can an Editor Do for an Attorney?
Consider the intro to this article published by a Florida firm. It’s about some recent news:
The FDA released new information on the Peanut Butter Plant that shows the company knew about the Salmonella potential, but failed to act on the information. This failure to act could have possibly prevented the deaths of 8 people and the sickness of 500 people with Salmonella. According to a statement from the FDA in the Washington Post, the Peanut Corporation of America found salmonella in internal tests a dozen times in 2007 and 2008 but sold the products anyway, sometimes after getting a negative finding from a different laboratory. This is an outrage that a company would ignore important data and findings. I would like to know their excuse or rationale for not taking these reports seriously.
To a skilled and experienced editor, there’s a serious problem with this intro, and that’s the claim that the company’s failure to act could have possibly prevented the deaths of 8 people and the sickness of 500 people.
The company’s failure to act might have prevented death and illness? That’s absurd!
What else does a skilled and experienced editor notice? Some weird capitalization, as in Peanut Butter Plant and Salmonella, and a failure to italicize The Washington Post. Also, referring to the Peanut Butter Plant as the company, setting three paragraphs as one, and that strange phrase, “the sickness of 500 people with Salmonella.”
Here’s the article from The Washington Post.
Can you find in it “a statement from the FDA?” No.
Here’s what that intro might look like after it was touched by an editor:
According to a recent article in The Washington Post, the Peanut Corporation of American — the company that owned and operated the Georgia peanut plant that turned out to be the source of an outbreak of salmonella that killed eight and sickened hundreds — knew through internal tests that its products were infected with the deadly bacteria, yet it sold the products anyway.
This is outrageous! The company knew of the problem, but ignored it. And I want to know why.
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Writing is thinking with a keyboard in front of you, and sloppy writing betrays sloppy thinking, which isn’t a great way to attract clients.
If you’re going to publish a blog, you’d best do as the pros do — put an editor between your writers and your readers, so your writers look sharp.
