#polishment

[mataii]

Rear brake lever, before and after 😂 . . . . #polishment #chromeparts #sportster1200 #sportster #xlh1200c #harleydavidson #harleylifestyle #bikecleaning #mexico🇲🇽 (at Villa de Alvarez, Colima) https://www.instagram.com/p/B5OLmd-hY32/?igshid=cbvit25rt1dm

[nicotinetower]

Revision, Polishing and Beta-ing

Whenever we think about text, we always think about revision. If you say you'll send it to the beta, or to be revised, or to be polished, most people will think they're all at the same thing - but they aren't. They're radically different things.

The easier to explain, understand and perform is revising. You get the text, check for mistakes in spelling, grammar and coherence, and then send it back to the author with notes and corrections. Five minutes, it's done.

Only that, if you're used to write as well, you'll find revising without polishing almost impossible. You'll rephrase sentences to make they sound better, chance the entire text in order to create a easier reading, or a better understandably of the material, or to adjust it to the voice of rest of the publication.

Beta-ing, on the other hand, means you'll obliged to argue ways to make things better. Their job is helping the author both finding their own voices within the text and respecting the established canon, characterization, and explaining any changes that are made. It also deals with revising, yes, but it's more than that, it's being a personal guard angel. Good betas? Are worth tons of gold and compliments. 

So, parts of my job involve revising. Well, it should, but then again, it's not enough. I end up polishing every text that comes about. They're pretty much notes - most doesn't even reach 100 words - but it's amazing how much work it takes. To make this example clear,  it's a newspaper about a kindergarten, and each class gets a comment/note/whatever you wanna call it about their week. That means, basically, that each week I find myself polishing 10 or 11 paragraphs, each from a teacher. And, even better: its not even the same teacher every week.

And, don't fool yourselves, they make many  mistakes. I spend the better part of a 6-hour work day just dealing with their texts, polishing them, which, sometimes, means deciphering what they meant and what they did. And it is exhausting. It's, possibly, the most tiresome bit of my work, because I don't only have to revise 11 completely different voices, but also, I have to make my head fit their mind-frame, so I can understand what they want people to make of their note, while not knowing exactly how it went. Sometimes, it proves to be beyond me and I have to ask them about those and that also wastes an amazing amount of time.

So, you could say I'm beta-ing them, except, I can't. They're not shown the mid-results, they see their text and my final version. Everything - the process between one and the other - doesn't reach them. I often find myself writing "notes" using the revision tool that won't be seen, but I feel like I  must write. If I'm not helping those teachers to improve their ability, then I'm not being nearly as useful as I could be. Still, company politic's: I'm not an educator, I'm a writer. I still try to protect their personal voices while making it readable, but that's not my goal within work, it's a personal goal - because this was how I learned to deal with it, how I've done it for the last 10 years in fandoms, and the way I feel good about myself instead of miserable and a fraud.

But, God, I miss beta-ing.