Studio Blog

I'm glad that we will be able to view our rating at some point. I echo a previous post that some rewrites are very simple or involve just responding to a suggestion. To me, there are two or three levels/classifications of rewrites. I hadn't considered that *any* rewrite triggers a mark on your rating. Good to keep in mind.

"We also take a hard look at writers who have had more than 40% of their submitted articles (all time) sent back for rewrites. One of the major complaints we’ve heard from our writer community is not having timely, fair reviews of their content. One issue that works against that is poor writing which backs up the copy-editing queue."

This is pretty bazaar, and more just a little annyoing.

First, as KimK said: "Most writing businesses in the world have editors, that is what they are for." The goal of all copy editing, as I understand it, is to help improve the writing. If DS is paying CE, than that's an investment in improving the writing. To see CE's as a cost to DS makes no sense. The reason CE's exist is to lend a pair of extra eyes to the writing, to improve it. That's a rational goal of publishers and good CE are worth their weight in gold.

CE's are a cost, however, if the real goal of CE's to move articles through the pipeline as quickly as possible. That's Quality Control. In this case, you want spend as little as possible on QC, and I think that's the real job of DS's CEs. QC people don't try to "improve" things -- they catch errors.

Second, it seems to me that DS's CEs simply don't have the time or incentive to improve the writing. In one case, the CE's edits actually hurt the writing from a style point of view. For example, here's an original sentence in one of my submissions:

"General symptoms of TBI or anoxic damage are typically: headaches, loss of consciousness, vomiting, seizures, or paralysis."

Here's the CE's edit:

"General symptoms of TBI or anoxic damage are typically: headaches, loss of consciousness, vomiting, seizures or paralysis."

Removing that final comma was a grammatical error (See Strunk & White). Worse, the CE missed MY grammatical error: the sentence before the list is NOT a complete sentence.

Here's another original sentence:

"The specifics will depend on the patient’s age and the strengths and weakness of both the healthy and impaired parts of the brain."

Here's the CE's edit:

"The specifics will depend on the patient’s age— and the strengths and weakness of both the healthy and impaired parts of the brain."

There's no justification to insert a dash here. The second part of the sentence is not an abrupt break or interruption.

So what's my point? Clearly DS needs to remove sub-pair writers, but DS needs to get it's own house in order when it comes to accurately identifying poor writers. CE's are the weakest link in that. I can live with the fact that CE aren't really there to help improve the writing -- there's clearly no time or real incentive for them to do that. But neither is there really time for them to do a good job in "judging" the quality of the writing in terms of grammar or style. That takes time, and that's a critical part of the job of improving writing, which the CE's here just don't have time for. And if they don't really have sufficient time for that, then what's the basis for requesting re-writes? If writer didn't follow objective DS style guidelines, OK. If the CE just subjectively doesn't think the article is good enough, or if a writer's score is lowered because the CE doesn't think the grammar was good enough, that's really not OK: DS, in my opinion, doesn't give their CE's the tools, time or incentive to adequately make those types of calls.

DS is a online publishing machine, and they have certain styles and format requirements for their articles. And the business model must assume a minimum rate of publishing and a minimum ROI in ad and adsense revenue on it's articles to meet certain bottom line goals, to get more financing, more investment, etc. It seems like all this emphasis on "quality" is really just a show for investors and the outside world. Does DS really, honestly, care about quality that much? Give the time constraints on CEs and their incentive structure -- sorry, I just have a hard time swallowing that.

Writers should only be fired for deliberate plagiarism or contently failing to follow objective DS style formatting guidelines.

Actually, removing the final comma was not a grammatical error on the part of the CE. DMS uses AP style rather than the CMOS or other style guide, and AP style does not use serial commas.

I realize I need to step up my grammar part as it has been slipping lately. I found an online grammar class as a refresher to help me.

some rewrites are due to frmatting and there seems to be a lack of c onsistency with that.