Wanted: Editor

I was reading one of my posts last night to my mom who hadn't had a chance to catch up on-line. That's when it hit me. I need an Editor.

As I was reading verbatim from my blog to her over the phone, I was stumbling in places. I had missed a word, or found a wrong word, or something else that threw me off. I do try to spell check my posts before posting, and even after posting, I occasionally will break the rules of blogging and go back and edit an obvious typo. In this case, most of the issues were where I used the wrong word, but a correctly spelled one. I had typed weather, instead of whether for instance. I'm usually pretty good about using the right word, but I was either typing too fast, or tried to correct a miss-spelling and chose the wrong replacement.

I've seen plenty of typos that lead to some really funny quotes. Spell checking is not enough as evidenced by:

Spelling Poem
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

Now, I can't pay for a professional editor (though feel free to chime in if you find something wrong. I play that game when I'm reading books, etc. -- looking for wrong, missing words or miss-spellings), you'd expect that a major company like Disney could.

I mentioned a few posts ago that my kids were really liking the Hannah Montana / Mylie Cyrus CD. The CD, when inserted into the computer, would take you to a site where you could download the lyrics. I played along. Keep in mind that this was the official site linked to by a CD that has sold hundreds of thousands copies... I downloaded the lyrics and took them in the car for the next sing-along journey.

After the kids had used them a few times, I tried to follow along (just for curiosity's sake). I was shocked that the words didn't match the songs. Some times they were just missing a word. Other times, it was obviously a different word being sung than the one printed. Why didn't anyone catch this?! It made me mad.

I downloaded the lyrics again and pasted them into Word, turned on Track Changes, and listed to each and every song, changing the lyrics as needed. When I was done I was staring at several pages of redlining and strike-throughs. I finally just accepted the fact and moved on (yeah right, I still have a chip on my shoulder), accepted all revisions and printed a clean copy for the car...