Grammarians on Grammarians

Since joining the Grammarians team in 2001, I've had the opportunity to collaborate with experts on projects that delve into a fascinating range of subjects. As a writer, editor, occasional translator, all-around language lover and—yes, I'll say it!—policy wonk, nothing tickles me more than immersing myself in the amazing variety of projects that find their way to Mellen Candage. Courtesy of Grammarians, I've wrestled through—and, so they tell me, made sense of—texts by native and non-native English speakers on such thorny topics as the technology that enables the creation of autonomous robot soccer teams; the process by which public education is funded in Tajikistan; the entrepreneurial and public policy initiatives required to advance bioenergy for sustainable development; the range of high- and low-tech innovations that can save the lives of marine mammals by reducing fishing by-catch; and the economic factors companies must consider before making a shift to all-wireless communications. It's hard to imagine where else I might have met equal challenges on this scope of substantive projects. And it's impossible to imagine having met those challenges alone in my office had I not known I had Grammarians's extensive and whip-smart support network behind me at all times.

- Randy B. Hecht

Why I Came to Grammarians—and Why I Came Back
After being laid off in 1988, I went through the yellow pages of the telephone directory, looking for editorial agencies. After I saw the entry for Grammarians, I rang Mellen Candage and asked if I could send in a resume. She invited me to do that and to take the tests for editing and proofreading. After I mailed the tests back and was accepted as a Grammarians editor, Mellen began sending me assignments. If work could ever be said to be enjoyable, I'd rate Grammarians as having achieved that impossible state of affairs. Not only is Mellen extremely pleasant to work with, but the work itself is interesting because of the nature of Grammarians' clients. In the early days, Grammarians used couriers that delivered the editing assignments to the editors' homes and picked up the work when it was completed; now it's all done by e-mail. After a few years of working for Grammarians as a freelance editor, I left to get a full-time job, but as soon as I retired, I came back. Why? Mellen is great to work with, the work is still interesting, and best of all—as a Grammarians editor I can work in blue jeans, from a home office that has a window overlooking the quiet suburban street where I live, with two beagles for company. Oh, and by the way—the deadlines are reasonable and the pay is decent!

- Diana Read

One of the great benefits of being in the Grammarians fold is the circle of colleagues I have come to depend upon. If I get stuck on a technical issue, I can send an email to a group of professionals and invariably I get valuable input back in no time. It's also great that in the rare occasion that I want to take a few days off, there are human resources that I can entrust with my projects until my return. I am truly grateful for the wonderful camaraderie that has developed between all of us.

- Laura Hurst

Among the many ideas that come to my mind when thinking about working with Grammarians, here is the salient one: The confidence and trust you have in me — confidence in my professionalism and the high quality of my work, trust in my integrity when dialoguing directly with your clients to ensure that my final product/ translation will fully satisfy their requirements and their deadlines.

- Marguerite Zandrowicz

I began working with Grammarians in August 2000, and it's been quite a learning experience—formatting involved with the Chicago style manual for instance! And I do believe my command of the English language has improved as a result of deciphering the product of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) scanning. A few times I have felt as though I had bitten off a little more than I could chew, but somehow I've always managed to get the job done to the degree of excellence that is expected from Grammarians. Granted, it might require working until the wee hours of the morning, but that's okay when your bed is just a few giant steps away! I'm proud to be a part of the team!

- Joanne Endres

Grammarians has been a fixture in my free-lance life since about 1983 (my records go back only to 1987). I like the informal, but secure arrangement, which is based on trust—I will do the job as specified; they will pay me a fair rate within 30 days. If the job suddenly changes because of client indecision, I know I will be paid for what I did, if possible. I think the real triumph is the enduring productive relationship. Unfortunately, being treated well tends to make one expect to be treated well, and consequently a bit cavalier in dealing with others who may not be so conscientious about dealing with free-lancers.

- Winfield Swanson

I was inducted into Grammarians, Inc., three years ago. At the time I was raising three small boys and needed editing work that afforded some flexibility. Grammarians was a super fit. I have an international relations-economics backgroundand have thoroughly enjoyed editing World Bank papers for Grammarians. The agency is professionally and efficiently managed. All operations and coordination are seamlessly handled. Most importantly, Grammarians/Mellen has been a gracious employer. In all the time I have worked with her, she has always been cordial and polite. Whereas other agencies can be quite proprietary about their employees and asphyxiatingly punctilious on how to calculate the paid hour, Grammarians has always been an open and generous employer. My boys are growing up and so my work needs are shifting, but I hope that I will continue to work with Grammarians long into the future.

- Shazi Amin

I stay on with you because you put up with my erratic availability, and because the work keeps me from sitting on the sofa, eating bonbons, and working the NY Times crosswords all day. And because you supply walking around money and are exceptionally forgiving about my wandering off occasionally: be it to Italy, Ithaca, or the beach. How's that for dilettantism?

- Betty Fisher

I let my fingers do the walking in the yellow pages. The proposal company I'd been freelancing for had run into a slow period and I was looking for something to fill in, and didn't want to go back to temping. That first day, about 10 years ago, when I went in for an interview and the editing test is still, I think, the only time I've met Mellen in person, although I would know her voice anywhere. The only bad thing about Grammarians, and which isn't really bad, is that I am probably now unable to actually work in a "brick and mortar" office. I am so used to working at home and on my own schedule that I don't think I could ever go back to dealing with office politics or the grind of getting up and dressed every day (or any day!). It is just nice not to have to deal with people unless you want to. When I am having a hardware/software problem, I do sometimes wish I had an IT department to help me out. But now I just think, what would Carol or Michael do? Answer: search the Internet for others who have had the same problem. And if I still can't figure it out, I can call them. Grammarians really is a virtual community, and it is very nice to be a part of it. So when my husband keeps asking when I'm going to get a real job, I tell him not to hold his breath. Why do I stay with Grammarians? Mellen is great to work for, more than fair, always helpful, and, importantly, has a great sense of humor, which really helps out when things get hairy. The question is really why do they keep me???

- Gina Wiatrowksi

A Project for All Seasons
There is a swordfight in the movie, The House of Flying Daggers, that covers several seasons in a single scene. It's meant to convey the drawn-out nature of the fight. The fighters look crisp and rested when it begins, caparisoned in their ceremonial best. Soon the sun goes missing, snow flurries move in and there's blood everywhere. That's the way it was when we started a Grammarians project estimated to take two months, tops. We sat around drinking coffee and eating muffins, with Laura, our designer, visibly but not exceedingly pregnant. I'll have to skip several incidents here to qualify for a PG rating, but toward the end, I caught myself saying to the client, "Harry, she's pretty much had it, and she's about to give birth, so let's not push her buttons anymore, OK?" "My god, you're right, she was pregnant, wasn't she!" Harry exclaimed with concern. "Is she all right? I thought that was several months into the future." "Well, that was several months ago," I said. "I think we'll be lucky if we wrap this up before delivery." We weren't, and we didn't. Mission: Impossible The call came when I least expected it. Just a calm message on my answering machine with no hint of the crisis that had led to it. I barely remembered having contacted Grammarians roughly a year ago about a potential project, but nothing had materialized. Two sleepless nights later, I had finished my first Grammarians job. I never thought it would turn into a regular gig, but when I went over to Grammarians HQ a few days later to drop off project materials (which included a huge Mac loaned for the occasion), Mellen said, "Let's see what else we can find for you to work on." Sure enough, in a couple weeks I was wandering the labyrinthine halls of the Department of Labor among hundreds of other consultants. Over the course of seven or eight years, my list of clients acquired through Grammarians grew to resemble a Who's Who of blue-chip organizations in the D.C. area - not a bad thing for one's C.V. What I've enjoyed most during my time with Grammarians is the flexibility, a laid-back yet attentive and supportive working relationship, and a commitment to paying on time, come hell or high water. You don't find too many agencies with that attitude. Just Google "payment practices" and see what kind of damage other companies are capable of inflicting.

- Aziz Gökdemir

My first freelance editing work was with Grammarians. Mellen Candage taught me the ropes and helped me become a truly professional editor. Something I've always appreciated about Grammarians is its high standards. Everyone I've ever worked with there goes the extra mile to get it right. Based on my early work with Grammarians during 1996-1998, I was hired by PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting to be its Chief Technical Editor for its Federal Government Division in the Washington area. After that, I did a stint at IBM Business Consulting Services in the same capacity before retiring in 2003. Now I'm back with Grammarians, working from my home, and enjoying every minute of it. My two most recent major assignments from Grammarians were to edit a World Bank book on how parliaments can curb corruption (a most timely topic!) and another World Bank book on how to hire consultants for Bank projects. Both were very interesting to read, sometimes to the point that I was forgetting to edit them! Congratulations to Grammarians and to Mellen on her new website (or is it Web site?). I wish them many more years of success!

- Francis Speltz

In Praise of Steam By Mike Schwartz I ask the client, "What do you want me to do with this?" And the client answers, "Work your magic." That's why I do it, why I work as a freelance copyeditor/writer, why I work with Grammarians. I work magic. Sometimes the magic is rote, and sometimes spirited. Accolades? Most times we send our finished product into a void and it's never heard from again and never acknowledged by the client. So often we work in blank space, like free verse written in steam. But other times, yes, those other times. Our name is mentioned in the preface of a book we can hold in our hands: "… a real talent who added continuity and cohesiveness to this project…. Our frequent e-mails and phone communications will be missed." Ah, praise. My mother asks, "But what is it you do?" She needs an answer for her cronies at the pool in Boca. And I show her a completed assignment: Drought in Africa. Asthma in children. Poverty in Asia. Asperger syndrome. A toolkit for R&D development. Look what I can learn about! The spectrum of ideas! The experts I deal with! And she says, "How do you know what you're writing? Your brother, the doctor, he knows what's what," and I realize I lost. In the game of professions, my brother the brain doctor wins. Praise indeed. A call. A voice. Then a plea: Rush! An arcane and patently arbitrary style manual that runs for a hundred pages must be slavishly followed. Honestly, a call from a client saying that the copy I handed in and spent days transforming traumatized English into fairly coherent prose had paragraphs that were not uniform. Make the paragraphs all the same size. Of course. Why didn't I think of that? Wife earns the bacon, braving the elements like Caesar on horseback while I commute nineteen steps to my office, and the only virus I can catch is from the Internet. It's the freedom. Tendrils, that's what it is, supposing that what we do may mold what is a dissonance of words into soft valleys and hills, some sort of art out of the muddle. And it's what most of us at Grammarians do conscientiously, and determinedly. And the commute is to die for.

- Michael Schwartz

An eye for detail (some would call it a tendency for nitpicking) that drives my family members crazy was just what I needed to launch me down a job path that I had never envisioned. After 12 hectic years in the telecommunications industry when it was in its freewheeling, mega-dealing days of early deregulation, and then another 10 years at the other end of the spectrum as a stay-at-home mom, I needed something that would bring in a few dollars and engage my mind at the same time. In a .0743-second Google search for "proofreading jobs," in "Arlington, VA" Grammarians popped up (even though they had moved to Alexandria by then). The two best things about working for Grammarians — the flexibility and the job content. I'm still a stay-at-home mom, it's just that when I'm home I'm working. I can make every parent-teacher conference, every after-school sporting event, every 10:00 a.m. dentist appointment. But in those 20 or 30 hours each week when there are no demands on my time, that time is put to productive use. The internet (and Microsoft Word) is the miracle that makes this possible. For the most part, the work, even though my part of it is small, is important. Grammarians has some fascinating clients who strive to make the world a better place. Every once in a while I have to stop myself from reading for content and remember to read with an editor's eye. The developing world was never in my radar until I had to concentrate on the minutiae, through their publications, of what the World Bank, the IMF, and others are trying to do to alleviate the myriad problems that often-forgotten world faces. One of the most interesting aspects of the work is actually the distance from the authors—attempting to decipher from context what they had really intended to write, when the plain words of the sentence seem to make little sense (especially the intriguing sentences of non-native English speakers). Phrasing a query succinctly but with enough detail so that the question is unambiguous is a challenge. Then it's fun when a tiny bit of an author's personality comes through in the answer to the query. It's almost like oldfashioned chess by mail, although the moves are few. The vast full-time staff at Grammarians (that would be Mellen and her assistant) always brings a sense of professionalism to the work, yet never push me beyond what I can do. They understand, without ever really saying it, that the hours in a day are finite, that we all have other demands on our time, and that doing a good-quality job means taking the time needed to be the thorough nitpicker it takes to be a Grammarian.

- Sherrie Brown