You have to laugh at some of the spam you get, don’t you? Or maybe weep. Today I received a spam email from a proofreading and academic editing company. “We majorly specialize in proofreading academic documents,” it told me, with a majorly eyebrow-raising adverb (wouldn’t “mostly” have been better?). But before I had finished reading it I decided this one was a laugher, not a weeper.
Bafflingly, the company that sent the email (and I have decided it would be kinder not to name the company here) insists on certain specific style requirements that all submissions must meet: Your document must come as a Microsoft Word file (they use Track Changes) in 12-point Arial font, with 1.5 line spacing.
There is no conceivable reason why an editor should be unable to work on a file in (say) single-spaced 11-point Times New Roman. Any competent editor would know how to change these parameters at will during an editing session, if it should help in some way, and then change them back again to whatever the author had wanted.
The laugh point came when I reached this astonishingly unidiomatic statement:
On the receipt of a manuscript, we will make do to immediately send to you, the Manuscript Identification Number and the Manuscript Processing Fee, taking cognizance of the pages of the received manuscript, within one hour.
Let’s enumerate the reasons for thinking that the people who sent this should not be editing your next paper:
- On receipt of is much more common and more natural than On the receipt of.
- We will make do to immediately send to you is clearly the work of a non-native speaker who doesn’t know the meaning of the idiom make do. I’m honestly not sure what was intended, but make do doesn’t mean “try” or “guarantee” or “set to work” or anything else that would make sense here.
- The split infinitive to immediately send is of course grammatical, and don’t imagine that I’m saying otherwise (English has throughout its history allowed modifiers between to and the verb of an infinitival complement; see this post for some history). Yet I found its presence in a marketing message from an editing company surprising. Most writers insecure enough to consider paying someone to rewrite their prose will be acquainted with the (false) charge that split infinitives are bad. To use one when trying to sell an editing service shows an extraordinary level of either confidence or incompetence. In this case I suspect the latter: a tin ear for the sort of usage that will gain the confidence of potential customers.
- The comma after send to you is a clear grammatical error. Don’t put an otherwise unmotivated comma before a direct object. And there was no need to include to here, since you can be the indirect object. So send you the manuscript identification number would be fine, but send to you, the manuscript identification number is definitely not.
- The gratuitous capitalization of two ordinary phrases (manuscript identification number and manuscript processing fee) is a further detail that should have been corrected. (I have seen such practice referred to as Schoolgirl Capitalization, but that seems unfair to schoolgirls.) Capital initials need a clear motivation. Typically the motivation is the status of the word or phrase in question as an actual proper name. The status of vaguely seeming sort of important to you at the time is not sufficient.
- The phrase taking cognizance of the pages is a horrible chunk of jargon that doesn’t seem to be capable of bearing the intended sense. Take cognizance of usually means something like “notice” or “become aware of,” but here I think they mean that the manuscript processing fee will depend on the page count.
- And finally, the received manuscript seems unacceptable for reasons I cannot quite put my finger on. But the manuscript received sounds distinctly better, and the manuscript would have been sufficient, given that the opening words of the paragraph already talk about being in receipt of it.
The company that sent this spam claims to have been in the editing and proofreading business for 20 years, editing manscripts for native speakers of English. A frightening thought. They won’t be editing any of my papers, that’s for sure.
I managed to restrain myself from writing to them to tell them why (as with all spam, writing back only confirms the validity and active status of your email address).
Instead I clicked on the treat-as-spam button, setting the Bayesian spam filter algorithm to work on the endless business of learning about what spam looks like.