Bat McFerridy

Background

About Bat McFerridy

I love words. They are the links between human beings, connections between nations and - at their best - bridges between ideas. Choosing the right words isn't always easy; arranging and presenting them for consumption bring further challenges. Catching small but meaningful errors thrills me like a treasure hunt. Mistakes of content, visual placement, grammar, punctuation, presentation, font choice and, of course, word choice stand out to me as puzzles in search of elegant solutions. Sometimes it's not a matter of great consequence, just embarrassment - but embarrassment can be costly. Throughout my career as a proofreader, copy editor, and layout specialist, I have made a few rescues that are worth mention: • A journalist was covering a school's canned food drive in which the principal agreed to dress as a certain celebrity if the students met their goal. The celebrity's name just didn't look right to me, so I did a quick Internet search. Instead of evoking a 1940s fruit-hat-wearing dancer, the name as spelled belonged to an "adult film"​ performer. • As the segments of the newspaper were designed and arranged independently of one another, the entertainment review of "Spamalot"​ - featuring the headline "Not Dead Yet!"​ - was set to run right next to a heartfelt editorial memorializing the writer's deceased father. My quick change of headline saved the page from a morbidly inappropriate juxtaposition. • My personal favorite: a food editor's article listed off some aquatic vegetables worth trying - including sea cucumber. My childhood love for sharks and other marine life brought immediately to mind the fact that the sea cucumber - while edible in Chinese cuisine - is not, in fact, a vegetable but rather an animal known for spewing out its guts as a defense mechanism. Preventing client embarrassment - it's what I do.