Who Wrote That, Eh?
I don’t like this practice in the Navy, when the staffers write the article with the boss’ name on it, either.
Even in the Navy case one could argue that the article is the senior officer’s official position and thus worthy of only the one guy’s name on it, but it still stinks that the guys who spend all their time researching and writing get no recognition of the work they did. And it’s not as though those top bananas are doing anyone a favor by taking the brunt of the criticism–because when was the last time anything written by an active duty multistar flag in Proceedings got serious flak?
5 Responses to “Who Wrote That, Eh?”
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December 26th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
Chap,
How about when the boss or underboss comes in and says, “We (meaning you) need and article on XXXX to (Proceedings or other type). Get a draft to me by a week from Friday for review and we’ll get it published.”
Back in the day, I wrote a published bit that the boss put his name to where he changed two words. Two words.
Now, about speech writing…..
December 26th, 2007 at 8:35 pm
Ah, it’s been ever thus, no? I never received credit for any of the writing I did while in the military, except for the odd PAO piece I wrote here and there in my position of “additional duty” PAO (or NCO, as the case actually was) in a couple of squadrons. The situation wasn’t any better in industry, either. Perhaps the worst bit about being a ghost writer is the boss’ instruction “give me a couple of pages on XX — you know what I want.” Ummm…no, I don’t. Care to elaborate? BEFORE I waste a day or three writing what I think you want? I could go on for days on this subject…
I drew the line in the AF, however, when it came to writing my own “ticket” for awards and decs. And that “cut off my nose to spite my face” attitude cost me an MSM out of my penultimate assignment. I refused to write the draft citation and supplementary “back-up” information/narrative for the award, although I DID provide the usual, customary, and reasonable “bullet points” to support this activity. My boss was “too busy” to put the package together. Now THAT pissed me off. But I got over it.
December 26th, 2007 at 10:51 pm
Two words? This means, of course, that you were very good at writing for your boss! Perhaps all the time we write staff work, which by nature is anonymous, means people forget the rules are supposed to change when writing for the public as far as attribution is concerned.
Buck, I feel your pain. Or at least I felt it when I worked for a brilliant guy who didn’t want a finished product so much as something he could use to start thinking about the subject at hand. Endless revisions, often right back to the starting point. The result was better than we staffies could do on more than one occasion but oh, so painful. Sorry to hear about the end-of-tour, too…I used to take pride in ensuring the guys got everything they deserved whether they could write themselves all pretty or not.
December 27th, 2007 at 2:43 am
Wait! Do I sense an extension of the writer’s strike brewing?
Perhaps the most honest admission of this I’ve ever seen was back in 1993. My father-in-law gave me a copy of Limbaugh’s The Way Things Ought to Be for Christmas. (Considering the result–I made the mistake of trying to discuss some of the points it made over the Christmas break–my father-in-law must have been looking for reinforcements, because I’d never realized just how liberal my wife, her sister and mother were. It’s a wonder the marriage lasted another 14 years.)
When I returned to the blue zoo, I posted the prologue (which I would have quoted here, but that book is long buried in a box somewhere), word for word, on the bulletin board in the English department break room with a question: “Would you give a cadet credit for his paper if his acknowledgements page [a page at the end of a cadet paper where they credit any help received--proofing, spelling, transitions, outline, etc] read like this.” Basically, Limbaugh says straight up (though I paraphrase here): “I didn’t write this book, but I had long conversations with the guy who did, and what he wrote sounds amazingly like just what I would have said if I had written it myself.” I kid you not. Someone go find the book and give us the exact quote. Please. I know somebody has a copy handy.
The other thing that book was good for was silencing the femi-nazis in the department. (No, they are not figments of Rush’s imagination; I worked with them daily for three years.) When I got back from Christmas break, I displayed the book openly on the credenza of my small cubicle for no other purpose than the fun of watching this effect: Rabid feminists (I am a feminist–I have two daughters whose equality of opportunity matters deeply to me–but these were feminists on crack) would enter my space to say something, see the book, suffer a cataleptic fit, then back away more wide-eyed and speechless than Sigourney Weaver tiptoeing through alien egg pods. (I think this is what one of my CO’s meant when he accused me of having a habit of “poking sticks at snakes.” “But they are snakes!” was always my reply.)
December 27th, 2007 at 3:01 am
Heh. I’ve done similar things–like the thing at the end of this post, and a nasty habit of prominently displaying a blaze orange book of transcriptions of black box recordings from famous disasters in jobs with a lot of airdales around. That and a lovely little book called You Are Worthless that served as a Daily Affirmation for the year 2005.
My worst writing story–no, not that one–and not the one where I went to the two star, got the article approved, got approved to publish and even paid for the article but the d#@n thing never appeared in print–was the time I showed up at a staff and helped a guy write the Big Annual Statement. Corralled through every Navy high up mucketymuck in the universe. After rev ten thousand it disappeared down the memory hole–we didn’t do an Annual Statement that year–and a couple of months later the SecNav congressional transcript sounds a whole lot like what I typed one night (along with other things a whole lot of other people did, including the senior guy whom I was assisting, but these words came out of my keyboard darn it). So I am and am not in the Congressional Record. Sort of.
I’ve had a personal writer’s strike on one publication that only intensified when I found out that crony journalist pals of the editor got paid ten times what the intended authors, the ones that risk their careers to write, get.