THE LIGHTER SIDE: Editing Myths

Many people have the wrong idea about us

We editors are a misunderstood breed. Few people share our passion for correctness, and our work often seems tedious and obscure to the uninitiated. Even writers, who ought to consider us their closest allies, often don’t “get” why editing is so important.

The following stories illustrate some widespread misconceptions about what we do.

I’m not after your literary cojones – really! Editing in the business world Pay me like a professional The perils of not checking the fine print

I’m not after your literary cojones – really!

A young woman once told me that she was working hard on her first novel, and hoped to send it off to a publisher shortly.

“Oh, perhaps you can hire me to edit it for you first,” I jested.

She looked horrified, though not at my shameless self-promotion. “Oh, no – my book isn’t the kind that should be edited!” she exclaimed. “It’s a creative work!”

I had to stop myself from groaning out loud and slapping my forehead in disbelief. Possibly the most universal myth about what editors do is the notion that correctness is somehow the arch-enemy of creativity.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. When I read for pleasure, I always find that the small irritations of bad writing (which always mean a shortage of good editing) break the emotional bond between me and the writer.

Spelling mistakes, awkward style, names got wrong, poor punctuation, typographical errors, the odd grammar faux pas – all these force me out of my pleasurable engagement with the book, article or story. They summon my critical mind instead, and make me think in annoyance: “Why didn’t the editor catch this?”

You’d think that dedicated writers would always strive to avoid shattering that vital rapport between author and reader. Still, many people (like that young lady) continue to mistakenly believe that editing is about reducing strong writing to bland conformity – with all its style and character bleached out in the name of grammatical propriety.

Inexperienced authors often seem to think that editing prose is like emasculating it. No wonder they’re not keen: who wants their work to lose its cojones?

That’s just not true, and don’t let anybody tell you so! Good editing enhances the reader’s pleasure – or at least minimizes distractions from it, which comes to the same thing. It’s perfectly possible for writing to be both highly original, and grammatically flawless. Those are NOT mutually exclusive options.

No matter how colloquial or idiosyncratic your prose, I don’t just preserve its unique flavour; I work to strengthen it. My goal is to keep the writer's style intact, and ensure that any necessary corrections blend in with it. I always aim to meet the work on its own terms – respecting the author’s voice as well as the reader’s enjoyment.

Editing in the business world

Oddly enough, many of the worst “bad writing” offenders are businesses. And not just small outfits like Joe’s Shoe Repair, either, where hand-lettered signs might offer “Heel’s fixed and Seude cleaning.” Even big companies with deep pockets still manage to foist amateurish writing onto the world. Their menus and mission statements, websites and wall signs, brochures and ad copy, even their job postings, can all make sensitive readers cringe.

This puzzles me, because surely the commercial community has a lively incentive to look as good as possible to potential clients. After all, we constantly judge others by their use of language, in personal and business situations. So people would be quite justified in assuming that a company with carelessly written advertising material might be equally lackadaisical with its software code, say, or its shipping schedule.

A cynic might wonder why editors don’t rejoice at this situation. Surely consultants who earn their living tidying up messy prose are happy to see a lot of it?

But alas, that’s not the way it seems to work. We editors find that the general lack of interest in good writing doesn’t make us more sought-after; instead, it renders our skills irrelevant. As people get less and less adept with the proper use of language, and as respect for even basic literacy (never mind elegance) dwindles – so too dwindles any public perception of this being a problem.

From today’s corporate viewpoint, having material edited seems to make all the economic sense of having it embossed with gold leaf: so few people will appreciate the nicety that the extra expense can’t rationally be justified.

So we editors are faced with the depressing task of persuading potential clients to delve into already tight budgets for the sake of what most businesses consider a mere frill. If an organization can trim a few hundred dollars off a project budget by letting its copy go forth “warts and all,” then why not? Few readers are likely to care, or even notice.

Pay me like a professional

The financial aspect of the editor-client relationship seems to puzzle a lot of people. Goodness knows why; presumably they DO understand the concept of paying their lawyers, their acupuncturists, their mechanics and their maids.

The story below, featuring an anonymous writer and a naïve client, illustrates one of the challenges we editors often face in our work.

The perils of not checking the fine print

Some stories have less-than-happy endings, with miscommunications and inexperience on both sides compounding one another. The following tale of woe from 1999 was published in Active Voice, the EAC newsletter, for the edification of my colleagues across the nation – many of whom (like me) had also learned the hard way to ask more questions up front when taking on a new project.