hurfburf :
Google wants to know why anyone would put an apostrophe in the word "wants." Do you guys have editors?
OT, but...
Yes, Tom's has editors. I was once one of them, but only for a short time. I don't believe I would have ever let "want's" get by me. While I certainly cannot speak to the experiences any other editor may have endured, I can share mine. To that end, I will admit to times when I found myself...disappointed...with my editing assignment.
Marcus hired me to do some freelance news editing, and I was assigned to work on only one particular writer's pieces. Sadly, English is not his native language, and an unfortunate language barrier quickly became apparent. It was never easy to overcome, and often became quite...challenging. The expressive and grammatical issues which arose meant I would sometimes have to spend hours editing his articles, not just the few minutes required to perform a simple proofread and correction. I was compensated on a fixed-amount-per-word basis, so I earned a fixed sum per article no matter how long it took to complete each one. Additionally, if my assigned writer were to write only a few pieces in a week, those were the only assignments I received.
The articles I edited for "he who shall not be named" no longer received any grammar-related comments. (His previous articles quite often garnered such comments). And while it was never actually part of my editing task, there were also far fewer fact-related issues because I actually took the time to fact-check anything within an article I found myself questioning to any degree.
Marcus always had good things to say about my work. When I told him how long some of the articles were taking to not only edit, but to correct, he told me not to worry about corrective fact-checking. "That's the writer's responsibility," he said.
Chris Angelini was also pleased with my efforts, enough to press me to try taking on some of the feature article editing load, which he handled exclusively. (He may still handle them on his own.) We discussed the "unified voice" he gave to all of the site's feature articles, and after some discussion and trial runs, the best I could ever hope to do was mimic that voice. Why? Because that voice was his, not mine. I felt that in order to maintain the site's integrity, the "unified voice" had to be his voice, alone. He agreed.
Overall, my experience editing for Tom's was a good one, even despite feeling it was rather underwhelming financially due to the issues I mentioned above. Unfortunately, I had to abandon editing here due to a sudden family illness, and I just haven't had a desire to return to it.
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