Thursday, July 10, 2014

Fun With Editing

"You are all alone, and then suddenly you aren't; you are face to face with the biggest Wahoo you've ever seen. "

I've been editing a lot of articles over  the past week, and while I'm sure that editing is very boring when the original author has a firm grasp on the English language, I've been fortunate enough to come across dozens of mistakes on every page. Sometimes sentences are completely unintelligible, and that's when it's most fun.


When you have no idea what a sentence is trying to say, you have to start thinking from the author's point of view, imagining all the thoughts that could have been crossing their mind as they wrote their automobile accident of a sentence. What does it mean to come face to face with a Wahoo? Does this person mean that you're alone and then you're excited? Are they talking about a surprise birthday party?


Funnily enough, it turns out that the example sentence I've quoted above is actually correct (except for the first comma and the capital 'W'). The paragraph was about the joys of diving, and a wahoo is a type of large tropical fish. It's the best feeling of all when the puzzle pieces finally fit together.

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