STANDARDS
Want to Work as a Editor? Your in Luck
BY ANDREW
COHEN
You
may as well get used to mistakes like those in that headline.
If the résumés and cover letters that have come
across my desk in the past year are any indication, we, the print
media, are doomed.
I
have advertised four open editorial positions for my sports-related
trade magazine in the past sixteen months. Every day during my
search for qualified candidates, I'd open my mail with a quiver
of excitement that this might be the day that a prospective editor
would make it all the way through a two-paragraph cover letter
without making errors that demonstrate a) a fundamental lack of
knowledge of English or b) the kind of carelessness that you'd
really rather not see in someone whose job is primarily to catch
other people's errors.
You'd
be astonished to learn how many were gone after the first sentence.
One guy, the news editor and chief copy editor of his college
paper, misspelled the name of the local newspaper in which we
ran the ad. Another, a journalism grad who'd "had the opportunity
to cover wrestling articles for our award-winning college newspaper,"
now asked me to "please accept my résumé and cover
letter as an applicant for the editor/writer position." Another
was a working writer who'd worked for a "Scripts-Howard" newspaper
and was now free-lancing features. ("I got some very good interest
from several of the weeklies which I did speak with," he wrote.)
Several
journalists saved their worst for last. A journalism grad/ newspaper
writer whose cover letter included thirteen punctuation errors
ended it with this memorably penned flourish: "I thought that
your company and me might make for a fairly close fit." Another,
who had a B.S. in journalism and six years of editorial experience,
wrote a great letter that unfortunately ended with a suggestion:
"Let's get together and see if we a match." Sorry -- we not interested.
Then
I had an epiphany -- I'd forget all about journalists and turn
to the English majors, whose specialty is reading and comprehension
and whose obsession is style. Bad move. It was here that I found
a person with degrees in English and linguistics who promised
"superb grammar, spelling, and puncuation skills." At least she
didn't mention prooreading. Here I found yet another English grad
who began his letter, "After finding your ad in the Wisconsin
State Journal, please find my enclosed résumé."
Found it.
If
there's a bright spot in all this, it's that my candidates winnowed
the field for me. An amazing three of every five I received failed
their first test as editors -- although they didn't know they
were being tested. And what of the clean letters? Since I know
these could have been created by cover-letter software complete
with spellcheck, I invited surviving candidates to come in and
take an hour-long proofreading test that has roughly forty errors
in spelling, punctuation, consistency, grammar, and redundancy.
Four of five candidates scored below twenty. I also gave a quick
ID quiz -- twenty names split between current sports and news
events. Four of five candidates scored below six. The survivors
of this round were given a writing assignment, which most failed.
I've
been told by some colleagues, and some candidates, that my tests
are too difficult. Really? Personally, I think the very least
we can expect an editor or writer to be able to do is to distinguish
between principals and principles, elicit and illicit, liable
and libel, perspective and prospective, and council and counsel
-- which, by the way, spellcheck can't do. I also think that someone
who is reporting on events in the world -- even in the very small
corner of the world covered by my magazine -- shouldn't mix up
the tennis pro Yevgeny Kafelnikov (ID'ed by one candidate as the
"prime minister of Russia") and Slobodan Milosevic ("Guy we were
recently fighting -- Kuwait").
Whenever
I get together with other curmudgeons -- and I'm only thirty-nine
-- we never run out of people and institutions to blame for this
sad state of affairs. There's the crappy educational system that
pushes out graduate after graduate who can't spell. There are
the journalism departments that teach students how to get the
"who," "what," and "when" in their leads but fail to note the
importance of reading to students' writing. There are the employers
who have kept wages at 1960 levels through this time of prosperity,
leading to a massive brain drain from the profession.
Whoever
you might see fit to blame, publishers are getting desperate.
How desperate? Recently, another local publisher hired away my
assistant editor, who had a little more than two years of editorial
experience, and inserted her right into the top slot at his new
magazine -- without giving her an editing test. I suspect that
if he had, and she again came up with the phrase, "schools must
confront debates on recruitment in a new light," they'd have hired
her anyway. After all, I did.
Andrew Cohen is the editor of Athletic
Business, a monthly trade magazine based in Madison,
Wisconsin.
