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The joy of being an English editor
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Thanksgiving is a very busy day for most housewives and househusbands, but never for me. For as long as I have been in the states, I never once cooked a whole turkey myself. As a student, I was always one of our small lab’s party goers. After the graduation, I was often invited to some parties, sometimes two parties on one Thanksgiving Day. If not, I would buy a fully cooked turkey breast and invited a few friends to dine at home. This year’s Thanksgiving is a very different kind, because my son and I both have been sick and decided to confine the nasty cold virus the best we can by staying home. Friends have been calling. In one case when asked what we need, I answered: “To stay away from us.” In another, a friend insisted on delivering some rice soup to our door, and it was well appreciated.
After being bed-confined for 4 days, I was finally able to sit through a whole morning and did some editing. The paper I edited this morning is accepted and written by a group of Iranian scientists on “Moisture-dependent physical properties of barley grains.” I was fascinated by the authors’ nationality, because Iran is considered as “enemy” of the United States where I work and live. In my life so far, I only met one Iranian student at Nova University in South Florida, who invited me to his dorm apartment (downstairs of mine) to meet his wife and son, a very handsome family and very friendly, too. I also received a post card from Iran a few years ago, asking for a reprint of mine. That’s all the contact I had with Iran until this morning.
I was totally impressed by the abstract, which was so clearly written that I made not correction initially. I went on to read the main content, again very clearly written. So, what I ended up doing was more like copy editing in this case. In my brief life as an English editor, this is the first paper that requires so little editing that I wish all authors could write as well as these Iranian scientists. Since agriculture is not my field, I cannot judge the quality of the research itself. However, I can see how carefully they conducted their tests, and how well they explained each result. For the sake of my Iranian schoolmate and these Iranian scientists, I would like to visit Iran in person some day!
https://wap.sciencenet.cn/blog-306792-274266.html
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