[TowerTalk] Is "The Truth about Trees and Antenna Gain" the whole truth?

[Kelly Taylor]

Sometimes in the publishing business, you run into editors who don’t know they don’t know. One of the hardest tasks with translating technical subjects into English is making it not only easy to understand, but also easy for the editor to believe he or she doesn’t need to mess with it. 

K9YC does a very good job on his technical papers of explaining complex problems in a way that as an editor, I would know better than to change anything, or, at least, reach out to say, “would this phrasing be better?”

As an editor, a difficult but necessary part of the job is setting aside preconceptions so that something that doesn’t jibe with the preconceptions isn’t immediately assumed to be an error. 

Publishing is an industry that’s under considerable stress, to the point that in some publications, there are not enough resources to conduct the same level of fact-checking as before. No amount of wishing otherwise is going to change the available budget. 

So I tend to pay attention when a byline ends in Brown, Severns, Lux, Belrose or Silver. 

73, kelly, ve4xt 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Feb 8, 2018, at 06:06, Patrick Greenlee <patrick_g at windstream.net> wrote:
> 
> Proof reading is not the issue.  Proof reading will find grammar errors, spelling errors and the like. Technical editing can be a real problem.  I have written things that when "simplified" by well intentioned tech editors were in fact very simple to read and understand but just WRONG!
> 
> A. Einstein once said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."  The idea being there is a point beyond which more simplification will lose important content.
> 
> While the audience for QST is not, in the main, technically inept they are still not, for the most part, scientist and engineers either so there is a bit of a balancing act writing to a level that doesn't loose too many readers and still conveys the necessary nitty gritty of the topic. Bottom line: There will always be readers for which some QST topics are over their heads and others well beneath their level of understanding.
> 
> Patrick        NJ5G
> 
> 
>> On 2/7/2018 5:31 PM, Jim Brown wrote:
>> I believe that to be true of the editorial staff of QST. I too often find myself disgusted by technical errors in QST. But one of the authors of this piece, KE4PT, has a pretty serious EE education, and is the current editor of QEX. Dunno about W4RQ.
>> 
>> IMO, the worst thing about the article is the title. And, I suspect that the piece may have been the victim of excessive editing.
>> 
>> 73, Jim K9YC
>> 
>>> On 2/7/2018 2:34 PM, Tom Osborne wrote:
>>> I think the problem with this article, along with many other antenna
>>> articles.is they have nobody to proof read and see if this is actually
>>> factual or not.  I have seen many articles in QST that I read and shake my
>>> head wondering where they got their info from.
>> 
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