Badly.

This incoherent and meandering piece by Charlie Vick about how we have no space policy vision is a godawful mess. It's OK for Charlie not to be the world's greatest writer, but they do him, and their web site, a great disservice by running it in this condition.

It's supposed to be a professional-quality publication--not a bulletin board. They should be embarrassed.

You beat me to it, Rand.

Unfortunately, it's not just this one essay. A couple of weeks ago, they featured an op-ed that I would have sworn was a seventh-grader's term paper.

And then there's their support for/by Bruce Gagnon and his group: http://www.lamarssociety.org/archives/000016.html.

I'm sure there's a huge amount of pressure to get new content out on a regular basis. Since this industry isn't known for its creative writing skills, I wouldn't fault them for taking just about anything that came along. But that doesn't mean you don't edit stuff into shape before publishing it. I wonder if that means I could get this published on there....

I'm not objecting to their publishing it per se--just to doing so with apparently no editing at all.

Yikes. I ran down to the last paragraph, which should be a place for clear concluding sentences. It's one long sentence, but should be at least four rewritten ones. If you try reading it aloud, you find it can't be done: it's an impossible mess. I've seen several other scientists and engineers who write this way, of course - but journal papers are edited.

Yeah I was reading that one the other day and it gave me major tiredhead having to go back and up and reread the save paragraph over and over again trying to figure out what the point was. I couldn't tell if he thought that NASA was supposed to focus on more and better technology or if they were supposed to just start using the older proven technology of the Apollo era.

What makes it even worse, in my opinion, is this tag line at the end: "Original Version March 13, 2003: updated April 04, 2003"

Which means two things to me. First, this IS an edited copy. Second, the 10 days between the 're-write' and the new publication ALSO yielded no further editing miracles.

What are they paying web editors these days? I'm sure I could be persuaded into a deal to work from home editing copy for them. Editing Word documents and instructions into web pages at my current job has gotten boring, and it's an ancillary duty that I'm not getting paid for anyway.

Awful, purely awful -- and I'm just talking about the writing.

What are these guys paying their editor? There are high school students who could do better.

Maybe I should apply for the job.