Ray helping with a spot of editing
I came here primarily to work on a book called called ‘Record Keeping for Organic Farmers’ that Kristine and I have been writing since last winter. We’re both farmers, so needless to say not a whole lot of writing gets done over the summer months, or the spring for that matter… or indeed the fall. There’s always something far more pressing going on in the garden.
So having stretched the deadline as far as it would go, I realized that I was not going to be able to get this thing done without Kristine being right there in the building with me. I am the kind of person who needs to verbalize things in order to be able to solve problems for myself. If I ever come to you and make a long and confusing speech, with much arm waving, perplexed expressions and apparent questioning tone, then turn and leave the room without even waiting for you to reply, that’s what’s going on. It’s as if only by setting the ideas free, am I able to get to grips with them.
That’s what much of this week has been about. There have been periods of me locking myself in my room and typing. There has been a fair amount of scrawling on flip chart paper in different colored inks, with arrows, scribblings out and question marks. There have been extended periods of piano playing as I’ve tried to think my way out of a particular metaphorical corner. There have been the crazed rantings of a tired, frustrated little organic farm inspector trying to decide if the manure section belonged under the subheading of inputs or processes “You use manure, but the animals also produce manure and what about making manure piles?”. Fascinating, right? But then there was today, which was a lot more fun.
Flip Chart Ville
I decided, quite rightly, that I couldn’t possibly edit on a tiny little screen for a minute longer and that this final stage needed to be bigger and much more social or I was going to go completely insane. So I asked Kristine if she wouldn’t mind reading out my part of the book to me and then I would read out her part of the book to her so that we could get a feel for how another reader would understand the phrasing of the sentences and, most importantly, pull out little gems like this one “Organic Process Records record organic processes”. No, really? (That was one of mine)
While we were doing this we documented on flip chart paper all the major themes plus examples used to avoid duplication or bias towards any kind of farm or region of the country.
The result was much better than I thought. By reading it through out-loud it made us slow down and not skip over sections, or the other person would complain. It helped us to spot repetition; “Didn’t we do this already?”. It drew attention to unnecessary use of lists (the tone of the readers voice would get progressively more bored as they slogged through them) and things that just didn’t make any sense (paragraphs that had to be re-read several times with accompanying head shaking).
It took several hours but I’ve gone from feeling really frustrated with the whole thing to feeling pretty darned good about it.
The high point? Kristine reading (or misreading) from a list of helpful hints for record keeping.
“If (when you are writing your records) your hands get wet or dirty, laminate them.”
I’ve been chuckling over that all evening. You know, Record Keeping for Organic Farmers can be fun, with good company, some cake and homemade wine.
Kristine; laptop in one hand, wine glass in the other.
