Letters to the editor

Do you think that all our comments to a newspaper such as Financial Times sent to letters.editor@ft.com are read right away by the editor of FT? Wrong! They go there so that a blue-collar editor can first make heads and tails out of our comment. Only then does it get forwarded to Sir.

Do you know who is a good editor? One fine day, you find yourself agreeably surprised by the fact that they have actually published your letter in FT and you say to yourself, “and this is exactly what I said, so this time I must have written it well.” I challenge you to go back to your original and find out how many changes were really made, some of them with feathers, but others with axes.

And so, talking about editors, this is an as-good-as-it-gets opportunity to thank them all.

For my letters to the Financial Times I have been able to identify two editors of my words, Heather Davidson and John Munch. If there are more of you over there, please tell me or consider yourself thanked in absentia.

For the editing of my one and (so far) only book, and of my many English-language major statements, my editor-in-friend is James T. McDonough, Jr., Ph.D., whom you can find through JTMcDJrPhD@aol.com.

Finally for all my writing in Spanish, it is my wife Mercedes who helps me out, not so much with feathers though, but I will not give you her e-mail address as she is exclusively retained by me. (Shhh! She doesn’t know it!)

And so, friends, the next time you read a posting in this blog and you don’t understand what Per Kurowski is talking about, most probably it is because his letter is still in the bottle, it never got there, or it was just hopeless.

Dear editors, once again, thanks!

Per