Writing Boots

Last week at Hewlett-Packard, a managers-only e-mail went out—the kind of memo that always baffles me.

"Tips for virtual recognition and celebration," the memo offers. A real problem, especially for a company like H-P, with many remote employees and contractors. The memo's introduction describes the problem well:

All right H-P HR, fire away with your ideas for non-monetary recognition:

So far so good, as are some more ideas for warming up remote team meetings and using technology to bring far-flung workers closer.

But then the directive inevitably commands managers to "have fun" with their remote employees. Here's how:

Help me understand: How do grown people give such advice to other grown people? And how do the receivers of such advice, who presumably have enough reliable horse sense to be entrusted with management roles, actually inflict these ideas upon their charges? (And you know they do!) And how do the victims—and I've been floored again and again by employees' willingness to submit unblinkingly to the most humiliating team-building exercises—come away from their corporate days with enough dignity required to go home and look their children in the eye?

My questions aren't rhetorical.

I mean it: How?

British freelance speechwriter Brian Jenner is trying to organize speechwriters in his country into a UK Speechwriters' Guild to establish industry standards, share trends, offer professional development courses and "persuade UK business leaders, professional speakers and politicians of
the great value which specialist speechwriters can bring to their
commercial and public life."

An ambitious move in a place where the speechwriting profession is even more amorphous than it is in North America. Whatever Brian achieves with this venture will benefit us all, so I wish him luck and offer my support.

If you're going to be snotty book-reviewer type, you've got to have the facts right.

Alas, Heller McAlpin had one fact dramatically wrong when she declared yesterday in the lead of her Boston Globe review of Christopher Buckley's memoir, Losing Mum and Pup:

Oh boy, William F. Buckley Jr. must be rolling in his Sharon, Conn., grave. … [H]is only son, Christopher, came
out in a Daily Beast column this past fall with, “Sorry, Dad, I’m
Voting for Obama”—a defection that led to his readily accepted
resignation from the New Republic, the conservative magazine his father
started in 1955 and for which dad wrote 5,600 columns.

Well if he wasn't rolling at the Obama vote, he was rolling at his magazine, The National Review being mixed up with the liberal magazine, The New Republic (whose founders were probably also rolling, albeit to the left).

Those who would cast stones at McAlpin have obviously never had a similar brain cramp.

No, the problem is a lack of copy editors. This is the kind of mistake that almost surely would have been caught by a pair of well-educated, well-trained fresh eyes—the kind that newspapers have been laying off in droves. (Getting their asses kicked by blogs and freewheeling online media, newspapers respond by cutting one of the job functions that distinguish themselves from blogs and online media.)

As a young writer I laughed at some of the copy editors and proofreaders who I worked with. Behind their backs, I called them the placekickers of the editorial football team. I pointed out that they're often misfits, with nervous ticks and odd rashes. And I denigrated their contribution as trivial.

I don't do that anymore.

Immature people characterize quality control as "anal." Immature societies do too.