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Subject:Re: How to deal with incorrect editing From:Rachael Lininger <techwhirl -at- earthlink -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 29 Dec 2003 12:41:49 -0600 (GMT-06:00)
Andrew Plato <gilliankitty -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
>"Rachael Lininger" wrote ...
>> While there are no points of grammar that are actually worth my job,
>> if anyone has advice on how to handle this, I'd appreciate hearing it.
>Ask why the change was made. Until you understand why the person made the
>change, everything is just speculation.
Thanks to everyone for the suggestions. To answer some questions, the manager is a native English speaker, and the issue is not technical jargon. I'm very much a techie tech writer for this job -- in fact, once we clear up some of the tech writing backlog, I will be doing security analysis and incident response. The changes were made to save word count, and because the manager liked it better.
The article was a short piece on security awareness for the company newsletter. The first two paragraphs started like this:
"Like a lot of people, you may have received an email asking you to verify your "account information" for your Big Bank account or other online services. These emails ask you to click on a link and then enter your personal information. That might be your username and password, your social security number, your credit card number and expiration date, or other data.
"These emails are frauds."
The paragraphs were was changed to: "Like a lot of people, you may have received emails asking you to verify your Big Bank "account information" or other online services. These emails ask you to click on a link and then enter your personal information. That might be your username and password, your social security number, your credit card number and expiration date, or other data.
"These are fraud emails."
I don't think my prose is deathless and in no need of correction; that article was dashed off _very_ quickly to meet a deadline for the newsletter (as I said, I'm new). I just think that "fraud" is not an adjective, and that the con artists are asking you to verify your account information _for_ the online services, rather than asking you to verify your online services.
(If you're interested in the particular scam I'm writing about, it's called phishing. More information is found at http://www.antiphishing.org/ .)
Thanks,
Rachael Lininger, who is now terribly nervous that everyone will say she can't write :)
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