WorkinWords Comments and occasional rants on agribusiness and other topics – mainly New Zealand

Documents, sales brochures annual reports and other publications are issued, or posted on a web site, as part of the public relations operations of any business enterprise or professional body.
They are designed to inform customers, suppliers, stakeholders and other interested parties of the progress of the organisation or developments in any aspect of the business that could affect the collective interests of any party.
These documents represent a large part of the public profile of the organisation.
Can any business afford to have documents that are less than one hundred per cent accurate? They should be of the highest standard in terms of spelling, punctuation, grammar and style.
No matter how often you read through your own document or use Spellcheck to pick up errors, they will still slip through.
Copy editors and proofreaders, like me, are not only trained to spot those punctuation, spelling or typographical errors, but because of their experience or talents they also tend to have an innate ability to see where words or sentences are not consistent with , or do not fit, the overall style of the document.
They review documents to ensure the message is accurate, easily read and appreciated by the target audience without altering the content or meaning of the message.
Editing and/or proofreading a document before publication costs surprisingly little and can save a business from embarrassment of publishing flawed documents which can quickly damage any carefully constructed public image. It’s like have someone to warn you that you have different coloured socks on.
Freelance copy editors and proofreaders are not tied to your business, so they provide an objective and impartial assessment of your documents.
They also recognise and ensure that any commercial, legal or other business information is treated as being confidential.
Send a sample of one of your pre-publication documents to me for a free assessment and quote or call me to discuss your requirements.
WORKinWORDS,
Mick Calder,
Tel: 021 438941
Email: mcalder@iconz.co.nz
Web site: http://www.workinwords.com

You can learn something new every day. Today I read that 80 per cent of people who signed up for an online self improvement program bailed out before finishing it.

As the statistic was reported by one of the providers of such self improvement programs the drop out rate could have been understated, but 80 per cent seemed a nice round number.

My first thought was that the self  improvement students  had probably lost interest or they had no sticking power. But it may well have been that the course content was not up to scratch. So one might conclude that the statistic was meaningless.

Of course the course provider had a positive spin. The 20 per cent who persevered and completed the course benefited from the reduction in potential competition for any of the prodigious number of jobs or projects said to be available to the graduates. You can’t beat a good bit of spin.

Now I have seen everything. I happened upon a site advertising a program to generate new versions of any article by substituting synonyms and other useful phrases.

The advertised program was US$77 so I was not inclined to invest. However I did try a couple of freeware programs that purported to do the same thing.

The first one required you to supply your own synonyms or alternative phrases throughout the original and format them in such a way that the program recognized them. Once that had been completed the program generated numerous article by randomly mixing in your synonyms and phrases. Thus you were the proud owner of a whole series of articles that were completely different. Fancy that!

The second program was a little more sophisticated in that all you had to do was to go through the article to nominate the key words or phrases and it generated a list of synonyms or useful phrases for you. I tried it and it worked like a bought one – each article was different and definitely not a copy of the first one.

The only minor hitch is the possibility that the noble sentences composed for the original article can still turn out as utter nonsense or complete gibberish if the word or phrase combinations are not compatible. A lot depends on the time you put in to choose the words from the lists supplied.

I now realize how some freelancers are able to churn out 100 articles on any given subject, for which they charge peanuts; they just write one article and use a program to generate a whole lot more. These are generally classified as article spinners.

But, if the sample I tried is anything to go by they are going to be producing articles that may comply with the requirement to generate 500 words on a topic with several key words liberally sprinkled throughout the text, but which read like a thesaurus.

Of course there may be an up market program that recognizes that it is churning out rubbish and does something to rectify the problem, but I have my doubts.

I learned today that I should blog more often to attract readers to my blog and to spread the word about my services – so I will have to do just that. The advice also indicated a list of topics one could write blogs on. It all goes to show that these guys who advertise for bulk articles are presumably looking for bumf to insert on their blog sites to generate traffic.

Their requirements are that the articles be written in excellent English and that they are capable of passing any plagiarism test as decided by running it past the Copyscape program or something similar.

I understand there are programs that will generate articles containing specified key words – but the likelihood is that the grammar is nt up to scratch and the content is mostly garbage.

I wonder though whether many surfers are going to return to a site that basically carries bullshit.