Who died and made you editor?

Yesterday, I had a piece that I had written rejected because...well, I am not exactly sure. The form rejection said that it did not exhibit correct grammar, sentence structure, spelling and punctuation, which is like saying that something is not orange; it really does not narrow the actual problem down.

Looking over the piece, I could only find one sentence that was awkward. The rest of it would have gotten by the harshest of my university professors.

So I am left with wondering why it was rejected. Could it be that they did not want to pay for the piece and that was a handy reason. Or could it be that online editors are not necessarily qualified to do the job in the first place.

Yes, it was an online rejection.

I miss the days of the print market. At least there, you would occassionally get your article back with a sentence circled, so you would know where to look. But online rejections are even more cryptic than the form letters of the print market.

Looking over the piece, I noticed that I was writing at a college level; I was using complex and compound sentences, and some colons and semicolons.
And that is why I think the piece got bounced.

Call me paranoid. But there is one thing I have noticed from college class peer reviews and writing circles: if a person does not know why something is being done grammar-wise, they will say that it is wrong.

And a lot of online editors are not editors by trade. They are business people, computer people, and other people who did not have to suffer beyond eighth grade English (as in they never needed to prove that they knew what a semicolon was good for). These are the type of people that would prefer you to commit the crime of creating a comma splice, rather than use a semicolon.

Maybe I am wrong in this case. But the nagging voice in the back of my head tells me that I just encountered another editor who should not actually be an editor.

Swing and a miss

Professional writers are professional gamblers.

It is not something that we admit to. But when you examine the chances that we take, you have to admit that we are. We write articles and stories that we think people want to read; and that we, hopefully, can get someone to pay us for. We toil away in dark offices, being anti-social, trying to create something that will pay the bills.

Occasionally, we succeed; more often we fail. Even professionals who do it full time have eighty to ninety percent rejection rate. The full time writers make up for the low level of acceptances and bad paying articles, just like baseball players; we go up to bat a lot. Essentially, as the old economics joke goes, "We make it up in volume."

I get my fair share of rejection slips; if you don't recieve rejection slips, you are not trying. I also write my fair share of articles that turn out to be non-earning dogs.

I don't always mean to write non-earners. Occasionally, I do. After all, I am opinionated and think that getting certain information out there is important--even if it generates no earning.

But often like most writers I end up writing something that I think is going to do well, like articles for revenue sharing sites such as Helium, and the articles bomb. At those moments, my face turns red, and all I can do is swear under my breath as I ready the bat for another swing.

My latest missed swing was an article on the stock market, "How Many Stocks Are Necessary to Be Properly Diversified?" I thought that it would be a good money maker, but I can see already that I guessed wrong.

That is the name of the game, guessing, writing, and hoping that it is a hit that goes over the wall (netting a reasonable profit). Perhaps on another site, it would work better. Or perhaps if I was an economics major. Or whatever. It doesn't really matter. All that matters is that I keep swinging at the ball, aka writing and submitting.

It is not glamourour or fulfilling, but it is the nature of the profession that I chose.