Countess
03-01-2006, 09:36 AM
The agent’s task was formidable. She had received the document on Wednesday with a deadline on Friday. It was in deplorable condition. The writer had written above grade-level. The average reading age for adults was 6th grade, not high school or college. She wanted to reject it, but her boss had requested an acceptance letter as a favor to the writer, her friend. She had no other choice but to edit the story.
On day 1 she removed all the compound-complex sentences and vocabulary words she did not personally know. It was hard work, and by the time she was done, it was late and she went to bed.
When she woke up the next morning, she noticed her redlines were smeared and dark. She attributed it to the humidity and began the second day’s work: deleting all the modifiers. Adjectives and adverbs were not required for plot and thus were unnecessary. By the time she finished, it was late and she went to bed.
When she woke up the next morning, she noticed her redlines from the previous day were also smeared and dark. This surprised her, but did not prevent her from doing her work. It was Friday, the day for her to put her new sentences together to create the final story. When she was done, she submitted it to her boss, then went home and fell asleep.
In the middle of the night a chill woke her, and she got up and shut the window. When she turned back, she was horrified by what she saw: a phantasmagoric, ghastly but massive creature with a singularly bulging eye and an accompanying vacant eye socket stood between her and the door. The empty cavity gaped at her like the beast’s mandolin jaw, which had been unnaturally ripped from its joint and now hung loosely by skin alone. One of the arms had been severed completely while the other one was slashed to bits, as if it had been hacked away with an ax. Petrified and frozen with fear, she gleaned a final look at her killer before it struck, and observed with a heretofore unmitigated terror that the creature’s body was merely a shell filled with deleted words.
Get the irony?
On day 1 she removed all the compound-complex sentences and vocabulary words she did not personally know. It was hard work, and by the time she was done, it was late and she went to bed.
When she woke up the next morning, she noticed her redlines were smeared and dark. She attributed it to the humidity and began the second day’s work: deleting all the modifiers. Adjectives and adverbs were not required for plot and thus were unnecessary. By the time she finished, it was late and she went to bed.
When she woke up the next morning, she noticed her redlines from the previous day were also smeared and dark. This surprised her, but did not prevent her from doing her work. It was Friday, the day for her to put her new sentences together to create the final story. When she was done, she submitted it to her boss, then went home and fell asleep.
In the middle of the night a chill woke her, and she got up and shut the window. When she turned back, she was horrified by what she saw: a phantasmagoric, ghastly but massive creature with a singularly bulging eye and an accompanying vacant eye socket stood between her and the door. The empty cavity gaped at her like the beast’s mandolin jaw, which had been unnaturally ripped from its joint and now hung loosely by skin alone. One of the arms had been severed completely while the other one was slashed to bits, as if it had been hacked away with an ax. Petrified and frozen with fear, she gleaned a final look at her killer before it struck, and observed with a heretofore unmitigated terror that the creature’s body was merely a shell filled with deleted words.
Get the irony?