Bibs wrote on 04/23/14 at 23:54:33:
Fair enough, a criticism was linked to, the person criticised has now replied. Equals.
Better now that chesspub not get involved, not continue this if one party is 'getting legal', I humbly suggest.
I dunno; I'd quite like to talk about the editing process, explain some of the things Tim took objection to (referring to extracts from his blogpost, given in italics below), which can be done without getting into legal stuff.
The very first thing I noticed was the terrible English that was inserted into the book – Most of the examples Tim gives here (pages 75, 76, 110, 192) look like "leftovers"; that is, when the text is being tweaked, there are occasionally extraneous words left in by mistake. Authors can do that themselves of course when writing the book. Proofreading should eliminate them. The other one (page 149), "themself", is a reflexive pronoun of the gender neutral singular "they". (Example: "It would be better if they did it themself". You could use "themselves" in the same way, but "themself" emphasizes the singular form of the usually plural pronoun.) It's clear that Tim didn't like "themself", but it's not incorrect.
the very first diagram in the book was out of place! ... Everyman requires a chess author to submit the games in Chessbase format. I did this on the King’s Gambit. It’s impossible to misplace a diagram on Chessbase, as the software generates the diagram from the game in question! – That's correct up to a point. ChessBase does generate the diagrams when they're exported from the games. But when we add further diagrams (or change diagrams to fit the typeset) we use a different process: click the relevant position in the relevant game, use the copy diagram function, and paste the diagram into the document. Yes, I see the first diagram was wrong – I'm not sure how that happened; maybe I had another game open in the other position and copied that by mistake; stupid – but again proofreading should pick that up.
The bit about the dots within moves (e.g. 1.Nf3 vs. 1 Nf3) shows a similar unfamiliarity with process. There's no problem at all removing the dots. It can be done in seconds with a few specific Replace functions. (And it's not just Everyman house style; Batsford and Gambit do it this way too – maybe it's an English thing.)
Tait had written in his own variations, often not correct. He is not a titled chess player; he is definitely not an International Master. – Actually I am an IM (SIM in fact) at correspondence chess (but okay, I don't regard that as real as a proper OTB IM title either). As for inserting my own variations: analytical corrections/queries were mostly referred back to Tim for his consideration (some he accepted, some he didn't – fair enough). Occasionally, I might insert something trivial extra, for explanatory purposes (the sort of thing that would be prefaced by "Ed." in a magazine), and add text to that, but these would (almost always) have been thrown up by
Fritz running in the background. I'm not sure what went wrong in the case he mentions (maybe I missed a move out when typing them into the document), but I can't look at it until Tim gives the exact reference.
He reversed meanings of key lines, like where I said Grandmaster Larry Evans was “discouraged” when playing Bobby Fischer—and Tait changed the whole meaning by rewriting the text to “not discouraged.” – This is the only example I've seen (so far). I inserted "not" into the text because "Evans is discouraged or oblivious" (as written) didn't make sense with what followed. If Evans was discouraged, his play would reflect that – i.e. he would change his play – but he carried on regardless. So he was either oblivious or
not discouraged.
If Jonathan Tait had tried his vicious, yet childlike attack on my book (apparently because I had refuted, in my book, the above mentioned Nordic Counter Gambit which is his favorite – This is just silly. There's no "apparently" there. Editing may
seem vicious but at most it's
ruthless, all in the cause of trying to enable authors to say what they want in the best possible way (of which they're not always the best judge). Nor is 3...f5 refuted, incidentally, though Tim found a very nice idea in one line of it.
I am running into sentences and sometimes whole paragraphs deleted from the text (one of the paragraphs featuring a great quote from GM Joe Gallagher is just gone). These are exceptionally hard to spot, as it’s hard to “see something” that is not there! – I can't answer these without knowing the precise points they occur. But nothing is changed or deleted for no reason. For instance, if something has been deleted, that might because the author has already said it elsewhere and forgotten about it.
In general, writing is tweaked for all sorts of reasons. As editor you get a double overview, both micro (the minute details of the text) and macro (how things follow each other and how the whole all hangs together). An annotator, although they may have an overall plan for what they want to say, will mostly annotate move by move, not noticing repetition of words and phrases, the way they're saying things the same way, and other such inadvertent stylistic errors. And there are particular ones that afflict chess writers, such as reverse sentence construction (a clause with the verb towards the end; very simple example "Better is 1 Nf3", which just reads abominably, though it
is sometimes necessary to put things this way) or something I call Annotator's But (a clause, followed by "but" and a refuting clause, which gets incredibly tedious to read after a while). It's part of an editor's job to correct for style, which means tweaking the text. But it's done while maintaining the author's style as much as possible – the success of which can be seen by the fact that such tweaking is hardly ever noticed.
Okay, some authors are precious about their writing, some aren't. Another IM told me recently that I'm the best editor he's ever worked with; whereas, as a writer, I definitely fall into the "precious" category myself. But I'm a bit surprised about Tim because he's never complained before, and his submitted text always contains loads of abbreviations which have to be rewritten anyway. (And on a case by case basis; they can't just be globally replaced.) I've never minded doing that for Tim's books because I like them. He does his own work and always has interesting things to say. His King's Gambit book was good too – but it did need editing, whatever he thinks.
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Taylor's King's Gambit book pulled? (Read 100735 times)
