Letters to the Editor
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An editorial on editing?
I love it, Mr. Kamiya! I've worked as an editor since 1994, and it's nice to see an ode to editors! The curse we've often groused about between myself and my peers is that if editing is done well, it goes largely unnoticed -- only bad editing stands out to the majority of readers. It's the difference between a cleanly, clearly communicated idea, and noise.
And it's why everybody thinks they can write and edit at some level -- kind of like how tone-deaf people often sing the loudest. Editing's an invisible art, and, sadly, appears to be going by the wayside in the face of an overall decline in literacy, the dominance of word processing and spellchecking programs as a substitute for good editing. On one level it democratizes communication, but at another level, it bastardizes it. Bad communication tends to crowd out good communication, over time, because the former is simply easier than the latter, and where literacy isn't appreciated, the latter has no chance.
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OH RLY?
It's also about millions of readers who need to sort through this endless universe and figure out which writers are worth reading. Who is going to sort out the exceptional ones?
We seem to be doing ok so far without the help of our enlightened overlords.
Given the shit Salon has produced recently, this ode to editors seems bizzarely mistimed. The editors here bring us "uppity", Camille Paglia and the "Obama isn't black enough" woman. Meanwhile the best thing here, Glenn Greenwald, isn't edited at all.
Curious.
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nice article
I used to work for a daily newspaper and I fondly recall some of the letters and copy I was called upon to edit. There was the guy who sent ten page letters to the editor handwritten on yellow legal paper with different parts of the newspaper cut out and pasted on his letter, with little black arrows all over the place to indicate in which order his points were being made. There were the politicians who sent election thank you letters that were carbon copies of the ones they'd sent years ago - it was up to me to change the dates. People sent stuff on Post-Its. And did they care that I had to slave away and decipher this stuff and whip it into semi-coherent shape?
Of course not! They just got mad at all the stuff that got omitted.
I had to admit doing editing gave me a new perspective. If I publish a book later in life, I will have a lot easier time quieting my ego and accepting criticism. Hopefully.
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There are editors and there are editors
I was a good four paragraphs into this article, before I realized what kind of editors Gary Kamiya seems to be discussing; his vagueness throughout the article doesn't help.
Most readers coming to this article might initially think Kamiya is discussing the folks on the top of the masthead--of the very visible William Kristol and Fred Hiatt and Paul Steiger, for example. They're all "editors," but I seriously doubt any of them does rewriting, fact-checking, line-editing, copyediting, proofreading, or any of the other behind-the-scenes tasks Kamiya praises here.
Instead, Kamiya seems to be talking about unsung heroes like the late Claire Cook (author of Line by Line) or Eleanor Gould Packard (of New Yorker fame)--those who, often thanklessly, polished prose behind the scenes and helped authors avoid embarrassment and error.
A good editor would have clarified the matter for Kamiya's readers.
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Who Edited This, Gary? No Credit????
You are correct, utterly, totally, about editors. Who edited you this time? May I edit you next time?
My experience includes songwriting: Many great pros accept suggestions. Others will put out a contract on you if you do not kiss the feet of their every punctuation mark, even when they themselves do not even include punctuation.
You said, "The truth is, you have to learn how to be edited just as much as you have to learn how to edit."
It turns out that, by the time most people reach this point, they are too old and too silly to learn, and they never learn to write. And the audience does not care. The audience may not even read or listen all the way to the end, because of the bad writing.
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Editing? What editing?
I don't know how many times I've submitted stories to publications that insist that all editing be done in advance. Even worse is when a piece emerges from the editorial depths in worse shape than it was going in, and I don't mean that My Precious Prose has been tampered with. I mean that my stories have sprouted sentence fragments, punctuation errors, mangled verb tenses, and other new problems that are now my problem to correct.
It's frustrating. On those rare occasions when I work with good editors, I'm appreciative to the point of groveling, but that's not what I usually get. I now submit work assuming that it isn't going to be edited competently, if at all. Unfortunately, I'm usually right.
Writers no longer get away with dumping our rough drafts onto someone else's lap because there is no such lap. We have to do it ourselves. Sometimes I hate this, because sometimes a second pair of eyes sees what I missed. At other times, I see this as a good thing. I can't get complacent or careless, and both are the kiss of death.
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A Conflicted Dance
To say that I feel conflicted about this article is to understate the case considerably.
On the one hand, as a professional technical writer, I have benefited immeasurably by my exposure to the best editors. The rules that I have absorbed--or had pounded into me, depending upon one's perspective--have been invaluable. Active voice! Be consistent! No, you bonehead, the modifiers go there, not there!
A good editor who will work with you is a jewel beyond price. Who will listen, who will learn that, yes, that may not be correct English, but the geniuses who created UNIX, or the various networking protocols, weren't paying attention to English grammar, alas. And the next time, there's no red ink on that construction. And the dance gets smoother.
And yet.
And yet, one of the beauties of the internet, and of blogging, is that there is no filter between the writer and the reader. We are not bound by the style strictures of what is considered "appropriate" for the BBC, or the New York Times, or (heaven save us) Strunk and White. All too often, it can feel like your writing is being squeezed through the toothpaste tube of someone else's style sensibilities, and what comes out is not truly yours.
And to enforce that on the Web, and on blogs, would be a shame. When I read Digby, I read it because of her ideas, yes, but also because of her style. I read Glenn Greenwald, in part, because of his style. And Andrew Sullivan. And all the other bloggers that I peruse. And I would be most irked if an editor were to read my blog, or my letters, and tell me, "Mr. Moran, The Chicago Manual of Style indicates that you shouldn't start a paragraph with the word "And;" and furthermore, you should certainly not start three sentences in a row with it!." It is truly a marvelous thing to read the thoughts of these people without a filter, ungrammatical and occasionally misspelled though they may be. (Why did the New York Times put their columnists behind the paid-only wall, but not their regular news? Could it be, in part, because of their distinctive voices?)
But it is a dance. There is no question that editors can improve writing, make it better. But at what point does "make it better" become "make it not mine" or "make it generic"? And on the Web, as everywhere else, the answer to Kamiya's question "Who is going to sort out the exceptional ones?", it seems to me, should be obvious: the audience. If your writing is crap, no one will read it, and your blog with wither on the vine and die (unless you're a spectacular egoist). If your writing is good and interesting, your audience grows (witness Digby and Greenwald). I am baffled as to why a third party needs to be interposed in between.
It will be interesting, in the years ahead, to see how this dance develops. Won't it?