What an editor needs from a writer

 As an undergraduate I aimed to become a writer of fiction. Experience proved that I lack imagination. But for nonfiction prose--articles, letters, memos--I can tell you things you need to know. 

Don't be afraid of revising. You may need time to puzzle out what you mean to say, and then how to say it effectively. You may need to take an entirely different approach than your first one. You may decide that material you included is not helpful and needs to be cut. You may need to suss out additional material. Keep at it. 

Decide what you mean to say. You should identify the One Main Thing in your article/letter/memo. It needs to have a single principal idea or element, through there may be any number of subsidiary ideas or elements. 

Say that One Main Thing in a single sentence. When you can do that, you know what your focus is. Use that sentence.

Say it up front. You may want some introductory sentences, but in the name of God keep them short. Your reader wants to know very early on what this is all about--and deserves to know that. Treat your text as if it were classical epic beginning in medias res, right where things are important now. 

Keep the background where it belongs. As a teenager working for my local paper in Kentucky I once attended a county government meeting. As the members of the fiscal court listened, the county judge spat tobacco juice into a coffee can, and I took notes, an elderly Baptist divine launched an extended narrative that involved multiple people over a considerable span of time. Some minutes into it, I gathered that he was appearing to request a fresh load of gravel on a stretch of road. 

Bring the background up after your main idea is well established, and only then if it is really germane. 

Don't screw up the chronology. Your reader needs to be oriented in place and time at every point in your text, particularly if you get fancy with the narrative and switch from the present to the past and back. 

Organize your subtopics. Each of those subsidiary ideas or elements should be addressed in a paragraph or set of paragraphs, in what appears to the reader to be a logical order, with transitions from one to the next. This is also part of the reader's orientation. 

Choose the diction that is appropriate to your subject and your reader(s). There's a lot of room in English, from the most formal to the most colloquial, and you can plot where on that broad continuum you can most effectively say what you want the reader to understand. (Read it out loud to yourself; that should help you identify language that doesn't work.)

Give it a final read for the little stuff. You know, the spelling (particularly of names), the punctuation, the grammar, the usage. That stuff. 

The consequence: Neglect any of these things, and it will fall to me to fix them, and I'm good at what I do. I charge for it. But you would probably prefer to say what you mean yourself, clearly and effectively, rather than have me attempt to guess what you mean. 

I do say

 Coming up in the new year: In February, when I turn seventy-five, I will mark forty-six years since The Cincinnati Enquirer offered me a position on the copy desk and allowed me to discover what my vocation is. 

Most of what I have learned about editing in more than forty years can be found at the You Don't Say blog at The Baltimore Sun, which is either accessible only by subscription or no longer available.* Some of the videos recorded at The Sun, such as the first-day-of-class warning and the recipe for mint juleps, can be found on Facebook or YouTube. 

And here. I started this version in 2009 when The Sun laid me off, along with sixty other news employees (hiring me back a year later). This version of the blog mixes personal subjects with professional ones, but there is still quite a bit of material about editing, such as the importance of skepticism, a code for copy editors, and what is in effect a minicourse in editing. Feel free to explore the site. 

And as I mention "free," let me point out that if you discover anything of value here, I make it available to you at no cost. 

*I am not [cough] on good terms with the current ownership and management. 

Yeah, "the real story"

 An essay by Joan Didion in 1968 pointed out a fundamental problem with standard American journalism: "It is a comment on our press conventions that we are considered 'well-informed' to precisely the extent that we know 'the real story,' the story not in the newspaper. We have come to expect newspapers to reflect the official ethic, to do the 'responsible thing.'"

Half a century later, everything is the same, but worse. For years The New York Times has written about Donald Trump's administrations as if they were more or less normal presidencies; such "objectivity" is "the responsible thing." Lesser newspapers have hollowed out their staffs to meet corporate or private-equity directives and are barely able to produce even the thin "official ethic." 

To get "the real story" we have come to rely on columnists and commentators, some of whom (d'you recall Bob Woodward?) will hold on to that story until they can capitalize on it in a book long after the fact. 

And Murdoch's Fox News takes "the real story" to the next logical step by retailing grotesquely fabricated stories that are exceeded only by the conspiracy theories that infest social media and draw in the simple. 

It remains to be seen what effects will emerge from journalists' tentative experimentation with AI programs, themselves vehicles of plagiarism and fabrication. 

Not to veer into giddy optimism, I see a glimmer of hope in the journalism being done by nonprofits such as The Baltimore Banner (for which I work as a freelance copy editor). If you also glimpse such glimmers, feel free to mention them in the comments. 

Those holiday meals

 I posted this on Thanksgiving morning on social media: I made the mashed potatoes this morning, with cream cheese, Parmesan, and more butter than you want to know about. Kathleen made my mother’s corn pudding recipe. The turkey is in the oven and I’ve taken down the smoke detectors. There will be crab cakes and Key lime pie and wine and cursing from the kitchen.

Our daughter the pescatarian was with us, which explains the crab cakes, and the turkey was for Kathleen, who unaccountably likes it,* and for the guests from our day drinking group, who also like it and who were bringing stuffing and crudites in the shape of a turkey on a platter--no photo available--and Spanish wines. (Kathleen had also baked a pumpkin pie for the traditionalists.) 

It was always turkey in my childhood in Kentucky. It was turkey at Thanksgiving and Christmas, the only days we ate ceremonially at the cherry drop-leaf dining table in the front room, with scalloped potatoes and scalloped oysters (from cans; I was in my forties before I tasted raw oysters on the half-shell and discovered that they were actually good), and the sweet corn pone that my grandmother baked in a bundt pan. 

Thanksgiving and Christmas were the two days that I did not read at the table, having gotten tacit permission to read at the Sunday dinner table to absent myself from whatever criticism or quarrel was likely to erupt. We understand that holiday gatherings of family involve a pressure to appear to celebrate as if one were part of a classically happy American family and the parallel pressure of the lingering resentments that characteristically erupt on these occasions. I recall one family holiday gathering at which my older sister, Georgia, marveled that no one had left the table in mid-meal angry or crying. 

In recent years, when Kathleen's parents were living in a retirement community in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, we invariably went there for holiday dinner. When we arrived, there were always snacks arrayed on the table in the sun room, the best room in the cottage where they were living, and we ate and drank with abandon until dinner was ready. Then we adjourned to the dining room table, already fairly full, for the entire meal and desultory conversation, after which Kathleen's father retired to a football game in the back room. The meal itself was always somehow anticlimactic.

A memory of an idealized gathering lingers, when our children were both here or nearby and on Sunday evenings we had fam din: I made spaghetti with vegetarian tomato sauce and a big salad, and the four of us were together at table. But now the children are no longer available for weekly fam din, and Kathleen and I sometimes just forage.

Despite the days of Thanksgiving food prep and the hours of cleanup for a couple of septuagenarians, we have yet to succumb to the temptation of the restaurant holiday dinner, though we have tried some in the past. It would mean giving up the time of chatting over drinks and snacks in the living room beforehand, and the relaxed, contented chatting after dessert, reluctant to call the day at an end. 

Food and drink and family and friends at the holidays are so damn much trouble and so  damned exhausting, even when you actually like the people,** that I am not yet ready to give up on them. 

* When I was a child, the holiday turkey appeared for days dry in my sandwiches for lunch at school (and the lunch ladies hated me for bringing them) until I completely lost my taste for the bird. Even Kathleen's homemade cranberry relish and the Baltimore tradition of sauerkraut with turkey have not brought me back. 

** Kathleen does actually like people. 

 

Evicting Mr. Mencken

 A few days ago the Enoch Pratt Free Library dedicated the DeWayne Wickham Room of Maryland Journalism, housing the papers and honoring the career of the veteran Black Maryland journalist. The Wickham Room was formerly known as the H.L. Mencken room, and the Mencken Collection has been transferred to the Pratt's Special Collections Department. 

I have no beef with Mr. Wickham and do not intend in the least to disparage his work as a journalist or deny him the recognition that is his due. But I would like to speak briefly for Henry Mencken. 

I was eighteen years old when I first read Mencken's work and was intoxicated by the vigor and sweep of his prose and liberated by his scorn for the stodginess and philistinism of American culture. 

As I became more familiar with his work over the years, I was more deeply impressed by what he had accomplished. He made his mark on American journalism as a reporter and columnist at The Evening Sun and on American literary culture as editor successively of The Smart Set and The American Mercury, where he gave many writers, including several young Black writers, a platform for their work. His essays, published in six installments of his Prejudices series, sum up American culture of the 1920s. His late memoirs, published as Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days, are affectionate, relaxed, and delightful. Had he written nothing else during his long and astonishingly productive career, The American Language would make his memory worth honoring. 

But. 

But Mencken went into eclipse in the 1930s because of his strenuous opposition to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal put him at odds with many of his former admirers. And the publication of extracts from his diaries in 1989 revealed many ugly attitudes. 

There are a couple of things to be said in mitigation (not excuse). The diaries were written in a dark and bitter time of his life when he was mourning the loss of his wife to tuberculosis and was politically on the outs. The other things to understand is that, perhaps because of the influence of Nietzsche during his youth, he esteemed individuals and despised groups. That is, he wrote antisemitic statements but many of his closest friends, such as Alfred A. Knopf, were Jewish. He condescended to women but was a devoted husband to his wife during their brief marriage. He had a low opinion of Blacks but published Black writers. Don't imagine that he thought highly of many white people, either, including those in Appalachia who are my people. There are not, I think, many writers who could withstand the retroactive application of our current standards of virtue. 

Let the record show that I am an old white guy, and old white guys remain the diminishing group of Mencken fans. Tastes change, and reputations rise and fall. It's surprisingly easy to topple statues from pedestals. 

But despite his faults, H.L. Mencken's accomplishments in journalism, literature, and philology--and for Baltimore--are not trivial. I think he merited a room with his name on the door at the Pratt Library, and I regret to see him evicted from it. 

I knew Bob Erlandson; he was a friend of mine

 We learned this week that Bob Erlandson died Friday at ninety-four, brought down by a massive stroke. Among the Baltimore Sun reporters I esteemed over three decades, he holds a high place. Other veterans, some who worked more closely with Bob than I did, have been saluting him online, and I owe him my modest tribute. 

I saw in the newsroom that Bob always spoke his mind, clearly and forcefully. I admired his love of dogs and bagpipes -- I saw him march in his pipe band in the Fourth of July parade in Towson. He and I exchanged messages in recent years, and he respected and encouraged my work. 

In retirement he took to social media, engaging with a handful of friends on Facebook, where he was, as always, straightforward with his views. Two days before he died, he dismissed Donald Trump and all his works in a Facebook post:

"Trump has only ever wanted two things from his adherents: votes and money. What has he given in return: chaos, anger, division and ever-richer billionaires.

"The world has seen the damage Trump has wreaked in less than one year in office. Unless he is blocked by a loss next year who knows what further damage he can do on his march to becoming the American King."

But the thing that elevates him to that high spot of my estimation was his return to Baltimore after his term as a foreign correspondent ended. The repatriation of the correspondents was always tricky. They had lived well, often banking their salaries and living at The Sun's expense. They had enjoyed enormous latitude in the scope of their reportage, with very little direction from Calvert Street. Not all of them adjusted smoothly to a return to mundane Maryland journalism. 

Bob had been our correspondent in London, in many ways the prestige post (we owned a house there). And he settled down immediately as a reporter in our Baltimore County bureau, turning out prompt and polished copy until the day he retired nearly thirty years ago. He was as thoroughgoing a professional journalist as any I have ever known. He respected the work, he did the work, and he deserves to be remembered for how he did it.

Correction: A reader has pointed out that the Robert Erlandson who wrote conservative letters to the editor at The Sun that I mentioned initially, was not my Erlandson. Grateful for correction, I have revised the text. 

Give my regards, irregardless

 Facebook's Captain Grammar Pants laid down the law this week: "Irregardless is a double negative, and we all know that we can’t not never, no way, no how, use a double negative. You mean 'regardless.' If you use 'irregardless,' regardless of the consequences, you might not get that job interview. Please be aware that certain dictionaries that SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS have given up the fight and now accept 'irregardless' as a synonym of regardless. I do not! Stem the tide of ignorance and use the correct word, regardless!"

This post predictably brought out the peververein in force to chime in and offer additional crotchets. Whinge as you like, but English is, and continues to be, what we, its speakers and writers, collectively make it over time, and we made irregardless  a word some time ago, as I posted out in a post five years ago: 

Irregardless is too a word; you just don't understand dictionaries

While off for the holiday yesterday, I witnessed a spasm of dictionary panic online, after someone discovered that Merriam-Webster includes irregardless in its dictionaries.

Responses varied: [Gasp] [Clutch pearls] [Recline on chaise longue, applying cold cloths to forehead], accompanied by sentiments such as “Not a word,” “English is Over,” and “The worrrrrld is coming to an end.”

Let’s unpack the misapprehensions crowding together here.

Take “not a word” first. Irregardless is by any measure a word. It has a spelling and a pronunciation. It has a meaning, “regardless.” (Not unusual for English to have more than one word for the same meaning.) It has an etymology, a combination of regardless and irrespective. It has a history, surfacing in the United States circa 1900, with multiple citations since.

When people say that irregardless is “not a word,” then, they can’t mean it literally. What they mean is that it is not a word in use in standard English (which Merriam-Webster points out with the note “nonstandard”).

So we arrive at our second misapprehension, that standard English is the One, True English, all other dialects being inferior, subliterate, nasty. But there is no English Academy (laus Deo) to determine what is “correct” or “proper” English, which is instead the most democratic thing we have. Dialects bobble up against one another, and you get to choose from them whatever suits your purpose.

Let’s look at wicked Merriam-Webster, which had the temerity to include this word. Someone inquired whether any other dictionary does so. I reach over to the shelf adjacent to my desk and find irregardless in the American Heritage Dictionary, the New Oxford American Dictionary, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, and Webster’s New World College Dictionary. All of them, like Merriam-Webster, label the word as “nonstandard” or “informal.”

And they all have some sort of usage note appended to the entry, of which American Heritage offers the most comprehensive: “Irregardless is a word that many people believe to be correct in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. The word was coined in the United States in the early 1900s, probably from a blend of irrespective and regardless. Many critics have complained that it is a redundancy, the negative prefix ir- duplicating the negativity of the –less suffix. Perhaps its reputation as a blend of ill-fitting parts has caused some to insist that it is a “nonword,” a charge they would not think of leveling at a nonstandard word with a longer history, such as ain’t. It is undoubtedly a word in the broader sense of the language, but it has never been accepted in standard English and is almost always changed by copyeditors to regardless.”

(My copy of American Heritage is the fifth edition, from 2011, and it is already beginning to look a little quaint, with its assumption that there are still copy editors.)

Now we arrive at our final misapprehension: what dictionaries are for and how they operate. Just as there is no English Academy dictating correctness, lexicographers are not the club membership committee, deciding what gets in and what gets blackballed. Inclusion in a dictionary does not amount to an imprimatur. Dictionaries exist to tell you what you might want to know about words, both standard and nonstandard: how they are spelled and pronounced, what they mean, where they came from, who uses them. That’s it.

Yesterday’s online kerfuffle was an echo of the brouhaha from half a century ago, when Webster’s Third came out with neutral rather than judgmental notes and was taken to endorse ain’t. Dwight Macdonald had a major hissy fit in the pages of The New Yorker, and the whole clamor is described in David Skinner’s The Story of Ain’t.

Now, perhaps you could take a deep, cleansing breath.

The Old editor glares at AI

 A while back I shared a post, then deleted it after I was persuaded that the image in it had been generated by AI. I do not trust AI and do not consciously use it, for the following reasons. And because I am posting this online, I am confident that some generous soul will point out how misinformed I am. 

AI depends on accumulating a vast store of texts from which to generate material. Some of that text is copyrighted, and my understanding is that the copyright holders are neither cited nor compensated. 

The ability to generate new texts from this store makes both plagiarism and fabrication easy, leaving the reader with the task of identifying what can be trusted. We've seen accounts of teachers who cannot vouch for the authenticity of the work their students submit, as well as of legal filings that include bogus citations. (In a proper society, this phenomenon would mean more work for editors to ferret out the genuine from the dross, but few care enough about accuracy to engage editors.) 

AI requires enormous quantities of electricity for its servers, which leads to increases in cost for ordinary consumers and strain on the power grid. It also requires huge quantities of water to cool those servers, which makes it environmentally questionable.

I am beginning to see articles questioning the sustainability of the project: millions invested in  technology that is made obsolete by further technical advances before the initial investment is recouped. This could, these articles warn, lead to a financial collapse comparable to the housing bubble and subprime mortgage collapse of 2008. 

So, yes, I am not a cheerleader. 

 

To the students

 Fleming County High School in Flemingsburg, Kentucky, from which I graduated in 1969, has announced on Facebook that it is looking for guest speakers "passionate about their careers" who would be willing to "invest in students' futures for the 2025-2026 school year during school hours." One of the categories for speakers is journalism. 

Well, I am elderly, in Baltimore, and disinclined to drive there to talk for twenty minutes or so, but Fleming County did prepare me for a career of more than forty-five years in journalism, and I know a few things from which those students might benefit. 

I am writing this for the chance that a high school student might look at it. If you are a jaded sophisticate, you might want to read somewhere else. 

The first thing to be passionate about is reading. I was starved for books in the 1950s and early 1960s, before the library was established and when the school libraries were skimpy. I read comic books. I read history, biography, science fiction, everything I could get my hands on. And I kept on reading. Wide reading is the foundation of work in writing, how you know what works and what doesn't; and for an editor it is not possible to know too much about many subjects. 

Even before that wide reading, I picked up standard English grammar quickly in class. Yes, I was a teacher's pet and obnoxiously officious, but if you want a career that involves writing, you have to know and use the standard English dialect. Savor and speak in all the Englishes you encounter and like--there is nothing wrong with that. But mastering standard English grammar and usage is your entry point to the profession. 

When I was a junior in high school, Lowell Denton, the publisher of the Flemingsburg Gazette, invited me to work there in the summers. His wife, Jean, liked to take the summer off, and so I worked as reporter, columnist, and copy editor for six summers in high school and college. This was invaluable experience. Writing and editing are a craft; you learn them by doing them. If someone gives you a chance to learn it as you go along and make your mistakes early, do not pass it up. 

In college and graduate school I majored in English. Once again, the reading: different authors at different times in different genres, seeing how they stretched the language, seeing how they put things together in different structures, talking about books and authors with knowledgeable friends. 

Abandoning a misguided plan to become a Ph.D. in English literature, I by chance landed a job on the copy desk at The Cincinnati Enquirer and there through working with helpful and knowledgeable colleagues, I learned to be a copy editor. It's a craft that you learn by doing, remember? That in turn led to a thirty-four-year career at The Baltimore Sun during which I oversaw the copy desk and a retirement gig as an editor for The Baltimore Banner. 

So thanks to Frances Dorsey in the fourth grade and Lynda McKee in high school, to Lowell and Jean Denton, and to colleagues in Cincinnati and Baltimore and nationally who saw some prospect of ability in me, I have had the satisfaction of doing the work I was meant to do. I hope that you will discover as fortunate an outcome. 

What we have lost

The tone in newspapers, when I started out as a copy editor forty years ago, was that the copy desk was a place where reporters fetched  up after their legs or livers gave out, or a domain of quibblers obsessed with minuscule details--comma jockeys. 

Well, I do like to see a verb agree with its subject, and I can punctuate with the precision of a marksman. But the key thing, the fundamental thing about the traditional copy desk, is that it was set apart. It was not connected with the desks that generated stories, and it played no part in their processes. Instead, it was independent, and its members looked fresh at each story, much like a reader. 

Reporters work with their editors on stories, on which they come to an understanding of what should be in them and how the material should be treated. The back-and-forth between editors and reporters carries an inherent hazard of developing groupthink. The copy editor, traditionally understood, has not been a part of groupthink and can raise questions of importance about the focus, tone, and structure of the story. 

That gives, as former Baltimore Sun publisher Mike Waller once said, the opportunity to raise the most important question that a copy editor can ever articulate: Are you sure you want to do this? Are you really sure?"

On one occasion, a story came to the Sun's copy desk from a department head in which our copy editors identified not only an incoherent structure but a set of passages that could have constituted outright libel, and we defused it, to the publisher's subsequent gratitude. (I used a version of this story, with substitutions for all proper nouns, for years in my editing class at Loyola Maryland, and it never failed to leave the students agog. "You were going to publish this?) 

But as the newspaper business declined, the sharp-pencil people determined that copy editors were an expensive frill. The Sun's last copy editor departed in 2019, and some years ago The New York Times, once famed for its copy editing, disbanded its copy desks and assigned survivors to the respective originating desks, where they can resist groupthink, or perhaps not. 

We once had a model, and it served the reader well.