3 ms·
This really needs an editor. It starts off great, with a compelling story about responding to a roadside emergency, but then it veers off the interstate and me
by jdlshore 3mo ago
This really needs an editor.
It starts off great, with a compelling story about responding to a roadside emergency, but then it veers off the interstate and meanders through the countryside. The paragraphs — they compound. The em-dashes — they multiply. Words upon words and I still don’t know what the author is trying to say. Something about a system for responding to corporate pseudo-emergencies. I guess.
I’m a writer. I get what a preface is for. And I get why an executive coach writes a book (and it ain’t the royalties). But please, please: hire a development editor. Preferably one not named Claude.
(PS: emdashes are supposed to be used—as a copyeditor once told me—without spaces on either side. It’s one of the ways you can tell the true lover of the emdash from an LLM.)
- pfortuny 3mo agoNotice that the space rule is not so in Spanish (the RAE ---the Spanish Royal Academy--- states in its rules that it must be separated from the main text on both sides but not from the explanation). https://www.rae.es/ortograf%C3%ADa-b%C3%A1sica/uso-de-los-signos-ortogr%C3%A1ficos/signos-de-puntuaci%C3%B3n/la-raya https://www.rae.es/ortograf%C3%ADa-b%C3%A1sica/uso-de-los-si...
- euroderf 3mo ago> emdashes are supposed to be used—as a copyeditor once told me—without spaces on either side. But we've all seen the pages where the hyphenator is clueless about them and creates these massive superlong "words" that screw up paragraph formatting.
- asplake 3mo ago> It’s one of the ways you can tell the true lover of the emdash from an LLM Quite apart from this tiresome and unreliable LLM detector, it’s also a way tell an American from a Brit. We Brits use spaces (and endashes).