h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hey

Thanks very much for your subbing work on my entry.

I have a couple of comments for consideration.

Firstly, I noticed you dropped the capital R in Requiem Mass wherever that phrase occurs. I believe this is incorrect! I have attended a fair number of Requiem Masses and have never seen that usage, which in any case looks wrong to me! Did you have a particular reason for that?

"twentieth century" (two instances in this entry) - the guidelines recommend what I had, which was '20th Century'

"Britten is a master of orchestration and compositional technique and uses various means to create the intended emotional impact."

I notice you deleted the comma I inserted after 'technique'. Without a comma, the word 'uses' might be mistaken for a noun, I would have thought - or at least that would be unclear.

"Still, he didn't want his soprano to sing in Russian and overcame this problem by asking her to sing in Latin."

Unfortunately this is incorrect. He didn't ask her to sing in Latin. As I wrote, he asked her if she would be happy to sing in Latin. It may even be that singing in Latin was her idea.

"Having previously assured her that there would be no problem with a visa for her trip to England, they now refused to issue one."

Again, incorrect and not what I wrote. I don't know where you got this iffy information.

"Now all the work put in by Vishnevskaya seem to be in vain, Britten had the problem of finding a suitable soprano at very short notice who could learn this challenging new music."

I think if you re-read this you'll probably agree that it needs re-wording!

Sorry to have to bring these points up at this stage (and it would have been better to sort them out before you returned the entry, don't you think?) but they are important to me - some more so than others, of course - and I'd like to get them straightened out.



Bels

Bels,

I made very few changes to your entry. I think you've got me on the comma after technique. I was always lead to believe you either used "and/but" OR a comma - never (or at least rarely) both - although I realise it's quite commonplace. Point taken, however, about possible misunderstanding of the word "uses" - and I agree, I think a comma should be placed back there - in spite of what my English teacher taught me.

Dear Freddy, thanks for bring this thread to my attention

Dear Bels, I think that some of those alterations were down to in-house editing - and I've 'altered' them back

Thanks very much, Freddy and Anna, for sorting this out so rapidly.

I obviously misunderstood the situation.

But if I'd had the chance to look it over before it went 'pending', the misunderstanding wouldn't have happened.

Der Bels,

Entries go pending when a Researcher sends back an entry, but because the changes that you've highlighted were made inhouse (not by Freddy) they wouldn't have been there if you'd looked at it earlier. Glad we've managed to sort it out now though

Anna

Dear Anna

That was my point. Had I seen and ok'd the entry before it went 'pending' I would have known that any subsequent changes weren't down to Freddy. As things are, I got the wrong end of the stick, for which I apologise to Freddy.

I do like to check through my entries after they've been edited inhouse as well as after subbing. I learn a lot from that. I also like to check entries that I've subbed after they've been gone over inhouse. I guess the inhouse team just doesn't have the time to give feedback to subs on the finer points, so I try to take notice of how you pros do things and learn from that.

Bels

Dear Bels,

Unfortunately not - I really wish we did. We could post some of the more common changes to the subs list, but then everyone else on the list would know those subs who frequently make mistakes, and it wouldn't be fair for this to be so public.



Anna

Dear Anna



I quite understand.



Bels