Your Welcome

Ding, ding ding. Grammar police here. I'm going to have to write you a ticket for committing the most egregious, skin-crawlingly horrible error someone with above a second-grade education can make.

My God, that one irks me to no end. Seriously. "Your" is an adjective meaning of or relating to you or yourself or yourselves especially as possessor or possessors (source: Merriam Webster). "You're" is a contraction of the pronoun "you" and the verb "are." My welcome? Gah!

I never intended to be this pedantic, and it was certainly never my dream as a little girl to be a wordsmith and editrix. I wanted to be a horse jockey or a rock star. As far as I was concerned, I'd marry Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran and join him on tour a la Linda McCartney with Wings and be famous, rich and fabulous.

To be completely honest, I hung on to my delusion of grandeur through college, with never a thought of career in my head. I majored in English because it was easy for me and I never had to try very hard (big disclaimer: I failed 15 hours of math to get the one math credit required at my liberal arts college).

Reality, along with poverty, set in after I graduated and moved to Raleigh. I was fortunate to find a low-paying job I HATED editing vanity reference books. From there I moved to advertising then to corporate editing and freelancing for self-published authors.

Editing incorporates a lot of skills. The hardest is copy editing, where every little typo that slips by, no matter how many other things you fixed, is on your ass. It's not fun. That's why when my first column as an "Our Lives" columnist in the Raleigh News and Observer misspelled my name, captioned my print picture as "married to a English scientist" and the online interview as "Leigh Ann Frink describes why he wants to be a correspondent," I was glad it happened to me and not someone else who would have written a snotty letter to the editor.

Copy editing is the hardest, but working with authors is the most treacherous. It's downright painful sometimes having to approach an author and gently guide him or her toward what the client really wants from his or her work. It's a delicate task, but it's my job to guide the author to make the best work he or she can for the client/audience or veto the print. Sure, I've dealt with whiny prima donnas (especially in advertising) who would throw themselves on their swords over the deletion of a single word, but most often, as I've found, the writers want to create great product. Though I am the editor, not the writer, I do my best to develop strong relationships with my writers, because, really, it's my neck on the line if they don't deliver because I didn't give them good specs or feedback.

Is it too late to go back on that horse jockey position? Seven inches of height, 50 pounds and no knowledge of riding are an impediment, you say? Rats. At least I can be an editor.